


no mythologies to follow

by sazzafraz



Series: Nous protéger d'en haut [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Other, depictions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-02-27 16:15:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2699306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazzafraz/pseuds/sazzafraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison Argent is sorted into Slytherin</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. you have a special purpose in life

**Author's Note:**

> So up until about a month or so ago I was just going to leave this series unfinished. But since then a few things have changed and I've decided to finish this series as a 'last hurrah' kind of thing before I permanently (as far as I know) stop writing fanfiction and leave this fandom.  
> Originally when I started this series it was going to be three stories long and the focus was going to be explicitly on Lydia leaving most of the events outside of her life to inference. It was never going to feature a narrator from the main trio -Scott, Stiles, Allison- and it was never going to be longer than about 100,000 words. All of that ended up being a lie and I ended up with five stories only two of which were told by the same narrator.  
> Where 'which only hollow voices sing' was about dealing with the trauma of being forced to grow up too quickly and through a significant amount of abuse, 'no mythologies' is a coming of age within that world and as such deals with similar stuff i.e. trauma but with far more detail about how that trauma was inflicted. So please proceed with caution.

\--

CALIFORNIA:

_you have a special purpose in life_

\--

The Wednesday before Gerard tries to kill Derek, before the last two Argent’s pack up their ammo and their guns and drive away from the misery and pain, a bug goes through Beacon Hills High and filters everyone into Hogwarts houses. Allison, being not particularly gifted at spotting email viruses in between the various art and poetry mailing lists, presses the deceptive little envelope while drinking her daily coffee.

It’s nothing really, she’s in the Hogwarts generation, she’s sorted and resorted herself so many times that she can list all the house attributes backwards and forwards. Gryffindor is the house you want when you’re a child; it’s all bravery and nobility and no sense of fear. ‘Puffs are for loyalty and getting shit done; but there’s no sparkle and no drama, not when you cut your teeth on Harry and Ron dashing through the woods or Hermione punching out Draco. Ravenclaw is what you think you want; it’s got enough glitter and enough grit and it’s smart, too, which means something when you’re in the hell of high school expectations. It’s all better than Slytherin because Slytherin is where the snakes go. It’s for villains and murderers and liars. It’s for Voldemort and Allison is _not_ him.

No matter what the virus some asshole sent to her computer says.

\--

The Liu family are old code hunters.

They’ve got a compound three hours drive out of Beacon Hills. Her father stops there before they continue the drive. He wants to make New York and the Hunter Symposium before news spreads of what her grandfather did. The Symposium was originally conveniened to discuss what Kate did and judge whether or not it was going too far. All of them were meant to go together and defend themselves against a barrage of no doubt personal attacks on the Argent name. With her grandfath- Gerards’ plan revealed, maybe there was never a ‘together’ to begin with. Instead it’s just her father going to defend them. Allison will be learning how to be the girl her parents never wanted her to be.  

‘Don’t say anything. Let me do the talking.’ Her father pulls in to the large courtyard. The compound is strictly delineated by huge century old trees whose roots lift up the ground; littered with holes and branches where they have worked around nature rather than disrupt it. The Lui’s walk out of the wide front doors to greet them.

‘What would I even say?’ Allison shifts so the edge of her knife stops nicking her thigh. She still can’t figure out where she’s meant to put the damn thing.

‘Don’t say anything.’ He repeats.

In her heart of hearts Allison understands that her father does not think this is her fault. He understands the futility and joy of love. Even understands that Scott did not choose to be who he is. He understands, like she does, like Maria Liu does, that what comes next is not of any of their choosing.

Maria Liu is old and slightly hunched over. Her thin fingers are crooked from years of curled grips on weapons. Next to her are her two sons Samson and Dale. Samson only a few years younger than her father and balding. Dale is younger but with the kind of handsomeness that is preserved for decades. He could be anywhere between nineteen and forty. They stand straight as the imposing willows that guard the house. Maria’s fingers uncurl now, flat palms and long nails, and point just beyond the car. Allison turns in her seat to look. There is nothing behind but the dark road they drove, blocked here and there by the trees. Her fathers hand digs into her thigh and yanks forward.

Maria Liu frowns a little; this is her, this is the last woman in the Argent family? The last of the Great Five? A girl in a skirt with old make up looking behind her. Always looking behind. Even if it’s not said out loud Allison hears each of her criticisms and checks them against her own meticulous list.   

‘Pay attention,’ he says.

Allison sits back in her seat, straightens up so that her feet are lightly balanced, ready to run. ‘I’m ready.’

Her father looks at her but doesn't reply.

\--

She wakes up with a jolt. Tied to a chair. Dark. Her clothes are soaked and she remembers for a moment where she is and what she’s doing. Just as her head says _Allison Argent, California, Hunter_ a huge hand slaps her hard across the face, sends tingles snapping up and down her body.

The hand comes back again and pulls at her shirt, pinches her stomach, rolls her sock down and pinches her Achilles tendon with something cold, something metallic. She feels bile rise up her throat and swallows. Another smack to the head, this one forcing her head back. Her chin is held and her eyes clear long enough to see the racks and racks of shapes. Some long, some blocky, all threatening.

The hand comes again and grasps her throat and squeezes down carefully until she can’t feel her extremities and everything is filled with an almost excruciating light.  The hand holds her there. In the background the buzz of electricity starts. She thinks; _this is an again, this is the 4th time and they will keep hurting me until I stop responding to it. I can not cry, I can not shout, I can not be human. I must be something more to survive this._ There are a million sharp pinches, her skin burning and shivering at the same time, the other hand never letting up.

Then dark.   

\--

They don’t let her heal after the first torture session. She suspects thats half the point.

She’s woken up at 4am every morning to do chores, by hand, for the entire compound. All the cleaning, all the cooking, all the mending. By the end of the fourth day her hands are rubbed raw, cracked, and bleeding. By the second week she has heavy calluses that scrape against the smooth clothes. After she does everyones chores she runs, lifts weights, practices how to leap and fall. She fractures and dislocates her hands more than any other part of her body. A problem for an archer. It takes the Lui’s a day and a half to notice.

‘You need to have those healed.’ Samson Lui says while he’s preparing rice and chicken for dinner. There sitting in the large industrial kitchen, empty and quiet except for the sound of Allison’s scribbling and Samson’s precise knife work. Allison is struggling through a copy of the _Coven Transcendent_ , the witches version of an encyclopedia and magical dick measuring contest. It has the names of every witch and where they fall in the pecking order of magic, lineage and conquests. Samson tips the edge of her book down and pulls the highlighter out of her mouth. ‘You’re too injured to do your job properly. You have to make sure you’re never a liability to your team.’

Allison hands choose that moment to cramp so hard she nearly throws up. If nothing else torture training has given her a poker face like no other. ‘I can’t wait for them to heal. I’ve got too much to do.’

Samson raises an eyebrow and walks to one of the cupboards in the wide open plan kitchen. He takes out a blue sack, pulls down a mixing bowl and gets a bottle of purified spring water from the pack in the fridge. ‘This is Witches Brew No. 4. It’s for healing small wounds, fractures and burns. Any witch worth talking too can make this.’

‘Why would they sell it to us?’ Allison frowns. ‘I mean, we hunt them too, don’t we?’

‘Witches are,’ he smiles, more on one side of his face than the other, ‘difficult. The fae you can trust to be mostly self regulating, things local to the area even more so. Werewolves are frequently a scourge and pestilence but when they’re settled they are remarkably good for the community. All of them have mythology, culture and customs unique to them and that sense of identity makes them easier to deal with.’

‘Witches don’t?’

Samson pours the water into the bowl and looks at it contemplatively. ‘There was no great witch exodus. They were not born in one place and moved to another therefore there is no uniform way to hunt them. No stories from the Old Country to guide us. Witches are as different and varied as any normal human. They make their own traditions and their own ways of doing things. This makes them tricky to deal with because a) we have no idea what they are beyond what they tell us, b) we have no idea if what they say is true anyway, c) they’re human, with no weakness like silver bullets or iron clubs. If it couldn’t kill _us_ it won’t even pause their step. Most witches fall below a certain threshold of power, those are the ones that make shops and confectionery stores, places to practice their art in a way that endangers few. They make deals with hunter families, werewolves, druids, whomever is the highest authority, for protection in exchange for service. Those witches will rarely ever cause a fuss for anyone because they know what else is out there.’

Samson throws the powder in the bowl, frowns. He opens draws and cupboards looking for something.  ‘Most witches have a personal signature, usually a word or a scent that activates their magic and their magic alone. And I seem to have lost the word for the witch who makes ours.’

Allison smiles, ‘Is it on the sack?’

Samson lifts it with a sardonic expression. On the bottom of the sack is a small sticked on piece of fabric. ‘Touche, Argent. Witches have a governing body of a hundred or so. All of these witches have killed, consumed or otherwise bested at least 10 other witches of lower ranking. In this group there are several lineages; the Yerazig, the Abhainn, the Adisa, the Kohaku and the Gorlassar are the ones you will probably come into contact with. All of them are at least a millennia old.’ Samson says the magic word and the bowl begins to bubble and boil. He lifts her hands up and places them in the bowl. There’s a sharp feeling like something’s nibbling at her wounds.

She makes a noise out loud. ‘Weird names.’

‘Leave them in for fifteen minutes or so, so it can get to the nerves and bones. You should never soak in Witches Brew for longer than an hour.’ He cleans his hands off on a tea towel and goes back to preparing dinner. ‘The names are fake. I have no idea why they choose them. Witches powerful enough to have those names are cold blooded murderers. They eat flesh, drink blood, use the bones of the dead as toys. We specialise primarily in Asian and Jewish mythology but in our time we’ve become something of an authority on witches.’ Samson falls silent as he occasionally does in lieu of finishing a conversation. Allison goes back to studying. She flips to the back of the book so she can look at the family tree’s. Hundreds of years of killing and blood and magic written as names. It’s a warning more than anything. These are the survivors, the great killers, who have smite in their blood. Written on the sides are the name of the hunter families that specialise in witches. Those names are the balance and scale of history, mortal weapons, those that survive too and arm the next generation.

These bloodlines have kept themselves going through hell and high water and will keep doing what’s necessary to survive. She thinks of Gerard and the way he fought tooth and nail against death. She thinks of Peter Hale clawing his way back from the dead.

What would she do to be strong enough to survive?   

\--

Torture training is humiliation, a way to get back at her, her family name, whatever she’s done wrong. Every time she approaches that room the compound grows quiet. Every time the door opens and closes sounds like the last She doesn’t shout or squirm anymore. She doesn’t pass either, and that’s far more of a problem.  

She struggles the third and fourth times they put her in the room. All it gets her is a black eye and Samson’s hand pressing between her breasts as he blindfolds her. After that she makes sure to enter under her own power. It gets under her skin. They’ll make her wait, or start too soon, or make her choose how she’s hurt. It folds into this monstrous painful thing in her chest. The rages come first, the hot and cold flushes, her hands shake and she needs to move, run. Insipid and consuming flashes of feeling start minutes before she walks in and sits down in that dark room. Then its the flashes of sound, metal on metal, wood on flesh, her breath getting higher and higher as it goes on. The spoons sound like it, the shower, the creaks of a bed. The monstrous thing gathers inside her chest and makes sure that she gives herself away during sessions.  

‘What are you?’ His hand is pulling the noose around her throat, she’s not breathing quietly anymore. Rushing in and out of her mouth.

‘Allison-’ Tighter.

‘What are you?’

‘Arge-’

A slap. ‘What are you?’

‘Stop.’

A harder slap. ‘What are you?’

‘Don’t-’

Tighter around the neck. ‘What are you?’

‘Nothing- No no no no no-’

Even tighter now. Her eyes begin to close again. Failure. Good. She’s glad to fail. Glad to let go.  

What are you

What are you

What are _you_

‘Hunter.’

The noose loosens. ‘What do you do?’

‘I hunt those who would hunt us.’

‘You kill.’

‘Kill?’ Her hands have been unbound, she reaches up to touch her raw and bruised neck.

‘When you need to, you kill.’

She nods, her neck bleeds.

‘Now. What are you?’

It starts again.

\--

Dale hands her his water and a slice of lime. ‘You’re going back day after tomorrow.’

‘Yep.’ She hands him a slice of cold pizza. Dale isn’t an easy person. Samson is the same but in a much more bearable way. Both of them are stiff backed and formal with her, not because they believe that she’s a damsel that needs protecting or even their good opinion, but because Allison Argent may one day be what stands between the Liu family and disaster. Samson was very clear to her about that.

‘Your training should be more brutal. We should be more cruel.’ He said. ‘but we have to weigh what would help you against what would help us. Breaking you would make you hate us.’

Since Samson was using blood red paste straight out of a tube made of animal skin on her recently broken and mutilated foot she choose not to challenge him.

Marjorie likes challenges. Tonight's is a fucked up game of Capture the Flag. There are eight Fae in her courtyard tonight. Four deadly, three harmless, one a valuable hostage. It's their job to figure out how to capture the valuable target and neutralize the rest.

At least they don't have to work hard to tell them apart. The four deadly guards are red and purple mottled with long sharp teeth, the harmless ones are silver and grey and blue, the hostage is the same colour as the dark night around them. There are signs of a struggle all over the place. Fae and human blood on the ground.

Allison isn’t in charge of the team tonight, she’s here as support. The blonde guy leading the team has spent half the night going round and round trying to figure out which of his pre made extraction plans will work best. Allison tuned him out two hours ago.

It’s a five man team. Two support, two leaders, and Dale who came to make sure nothing got out of hand. He’s leaning on a tree next to Allison reading his kindle.  

Allison leans toward Dale. ‘Do you have any Witches Brew 23 on you?’

‘Hmm,’ Dale flicks a finger across his kindle, ‘why?’

‘Because the hostage is wearing camouflage.’

Dale turns off his kindle and gives her the full weight of his attention. ‘How do you know?’

Under his stare her throat dries up. ‘Fae use glamour, if they didn’t want us to see them we wouldn’t. Why, if all of them can make themselves invisible would only one choose to do so?’

Dale raises an eyebrow.

‘Because,’ Allison breathes deep, really hoping she’s right, ‘of the blood smeared on the trees.’ Allison pauses. Dale motions to continue.

‘The hostage has silver blood, there is way more of that smeared around then any other kind. Glamours work by tricking our sense of perception but watching them for the last hour I have at times been able to make up what is probably the hostage. Meaning it’s invisible due to a cloak of some kind and not a glamour. If their hostage is hurt badly enough it wouldn’t be able to use glamour, right?’

‘Allison, you’re telling me. If you think so, then you say so.’

Allison takes a deep breath. ‘Okay. The hostage is heavily injured, they’re using a potion to hide him, Witches Brew 23 is a dispeller. The biggest variable in the plan is finding the hostage. We do that, we complete the mission.’

‘Children.’ Dale turns to address the group. ‘Did you hear that?’

The rest of the team looks at her. The blonde glares at her. ‘I’m in charge.’

Dale acknowledges him with a nod. ‘What’s your decision?’

His face contorts with contempt and irritation. ‘We’ll do what Argent said.’

No one is more surprised than Allison when it actually works.

Dale stops her before she heads inside to her bunk. He looks at her thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

Allison grins.

‘Don’t let them see that.’ Dale frowns. ‘Never let them know that you’re not like us. We follow orders.’

Allison drops the smile. ‘Okay.’

Dale hesitates, ‘We like you, me and Sam. Mother doesn’t. She never will. The only one of your family she ever liked was Victoria. If we were the heads...’ He shakes his head, ‘I’m 26 this winter. I’ve never even been to university, all I’ve ever done was this. They’ll rip you up, Argent, they’ll rip you to shreds and make you like them.’

‘I’m strong enough to stop them.’

‘No, you’re not.’ Dale says sadly. ‘You can’t be.’

\--

Maria passes her as fit enough to continue her training at home two weeks before the beginning of school. Allison is both relieved and terrified of going back.

‘That was only a remedial session. I’m trying to get you into the summer lessons in Paris. The Maes are good friends and Liu gave you a good recommendation but she said that you’re resistance to torture was below average for your age and skill level.’

And how much resistance to pain and humiliation should the average 17 year old have?

‘Paris won’t be as hard physically speaking. Since we kept you in gymnastics you’re as fit if not fitter than half the other participants. But you don’t have the psychological resistance, the personal connections, or the ruthlessness of someone raised from birth in this life.’

‘Why do I have to go?’

Her father’s face pinches. He’s in that mode he goes into whenever he encounters something he feels he has to do but can’t reconcile ethically or emotionally. Most often this happens when they talk about moving or what to do with her mother’s things now that she’s gone.  

‘Because there are only two of us left now,’ he says softly, ‘and I never expected this to happen. I haven’t taught you enough. You have no idea what the Argent family means in this world. I want you to live more than I want you to be safe.’

What would she do to survive?

‘I’ll go to Paris.’

\--

‘Hi Mr Stilinski.’ Allison says as she swings Stiles bag into the back of the Jeep.

‘Morning Allison.’ He says in return.

‘We’ll be back in three days.’

Mr Stilinski arches a brow. ‘Stiles said four.’

Allison, well versed in saying things adults approve of, winks. ‘Well, unlike Stiles I keep to a schedule.’

‘Don’t let him have the slushie at the rest stop with the giant headless clown.’

‘What?’

‘Just don’t, Allison. I promise you that you do not want to know what happens.’

Allison shrugs. ‘The conference is being moderated and staffed by one of the Hunter families. My dad’s pretty good friends with them, if you need to keep in touch they should be able to get through no matter what.’

In actual fact none of that is true, but as well as being well versed in saying exactly what adults want to hear, Allison is well aware of how little they need to know about what you actually do. For instance Stiles dad is having very little success with wrapping his head around the truth of Beacon Hills. It’s kinder to just let him have the safe lie.

‘Yo, Ally A, we ready to roll?’ Stiles says as he comes out the front door. He may still be in his pyjama shirt. Dad, do you have your medication?’

Mr Stilinski rolls his eyes and cuffs Stiles lightly on the head. ‘Come ‘ere.’

Allison looks politely at the car while they hug and slap each other on the backs in a manly fashion. There might be some tears. When it gets uncomfortable for her to be around she gets in the drivers seat and buckles in.

The convention is in Texas at an abandoned air strip called Caulfield Air. It’s mostly focused on magic and alliances. Stiles is going for nefarious reasons of his own. Allison is going because the number one preternatural presence in North America after werewolves is the American Confederate of Sorciere. They produce their own material annually, and it’s passed around the Hunter families to keep everyone up to date, but it’s rare to get the opportunity to go see them all in person. She has no idea how Stiles got an invite. Maybe they’ll be something there that will help her wean the family off killing werewolves.

They tricky part was coordinating a big enough lie to get both of their dads to agree to let them go unsupervised. There’s no way in hell that Stiles or Allison could get the kind of sleuthing they wanted to do done otherwise. It took two corkboards, seven colours of string, eight coffees, a lie from Lydia’s mother about relatives in town, and Allison promising to learn Hindu for them to get permission. Everyone but Scott was surprised by what Allison and Stiles can accomplish together.

Allison gets comfy in the drivers seat. Secretly she’s hoping to make some first tentative connections. Her dad’s right, she is dramatically unprepared for life as the head of a Hunter family, and while she would modestly boast about her ability to kick ten kinds of ass she has to admit her lack of prowess in terms of diplomacy.

Gerard was a murderer first and a diplomat never. She wants the family to be different.  

The men part. Mr Stilinski gives her a jaunty little finger wave and goes back inside.

‘Ready?’ Allison asks.

‘You bet.’ Stiles climbs into the passenger seat. Allison starts the car and off they go. It’s nearing evening now, they should have left hours earlier, but both of them are eking out what time they can with their fathers. Stiles puts on a classic rock station and gets comfortable. She waits for at least forty five minutes, worrying her lip near bloody, before she cracks.     

‘Why this one?’ Allison asks instead of _‘Why ask me?’_

Stiles hears it for the question it is. ‘Because we’re pals. Scott’s spent all summer bettering himself, which is great because with this “Alpha Pack” nonsense we’re all going to have to be on our game. Lydia is not coping and despite my best efforts Danny still will not let me touch his dick. I even said we didn’t have to be naked for it to count.’

‘Nothing to do with my family name?’ Allison bites her lip. It’s really important that she know where she stands with her friends.

Stiles makes a face at her. ‘No offense but your family took a full scale dive into the crazy river. You’re amazing but, uh, I don’t really need to remind myself of Gerard any more than necessary.’

Ah shit, she’d forgotten about that. ‘I could be related to Peter?’

‘Derek’s so lucky he’s hotter than sin.’

‘He is not the hottest werewolf.’ Allison snorts. Sure she has a bias in Scott but really Derek has that lived in dirt feel. At least she knows Scott appreciates indoor plumbing.  

‘He’s so hot.’ Stiles mouth drops open for a second with pure lust. ‘And such an asshole.’

‘We have to do this properly.’ Allison taps her finger on the dashboard. ‘We need criteria. Height, weight, muscle definition, soulful eyes.’

‘How hot the wolfman face is.’ Stiles pulls out his phone and begins tapping away. ‘Scott loses that one, by the way.’

‘His is _charming._ ’ Allison argues passionately. ‘You want your parents to meet Scott.’

Stiles bursts out laughing.

‘Shut up!’ She slaps the steering wheel with one hand. She can’t stop smiling. ‘Sure, we had a few things in the way of a good first introduction-’  

Stiles laughs harder.

‘Fine. Other peoples parents would love Scott.’ Allison can’t stop the moment of sadness that grips her everytime she remembers her mother is gone. She clenches the wheel and it cracks a little.

Stiles looks at her with the understanding of other motherless children. ‘Did your dad really threaten him with dessert?’

‘We’re French. We take pastry very seriously.’

The only things they agree on over an hour later are that Isaac’s face is by far the ugliest, Peter is the least attractive over all, and that both of them would not want to introduce Derek Hale to their extended family.

‘And we would both have sex with Scott.’ Stiles taps a pen he pulled from somewhere against his lips. There’s a hand drawn chart on his lap with all the wolves on an axis of hot versus likelihood of murder.

‘I did have sex with Scott.’

‘Yeah but he’s loved me longer.’ Stiles grins. Allison huffs a laugh too quiet for him to hear and turns them onto the next road.

‘We’ll switch in four hours.’ She rolls her shoulder and settles her arm on the windowsill. The night air is cool on her throat, finds the dips of her clavicles and kisses along there. Stiles grunts, shuffles, as grandiose as he is in everything. He’s asleep with one foot hopped up on the seat and his elbow just tipping out of the car. Allison drives on.  

\--

Texas is muddy.

At hours from Caulfield Air Allison pulls into a rest stop. There are two fast food joints, a block of toilets, a gas station and a little tourist trap selling Native American knock off rugs.  

‘Television has lied to me.’ Stiles says dramatically as he undoes his seat belt, ‘Texas is meant to be even sunnier than California.’

‘Sunnier than the Sunshine State?’

‘That’s Florida.’

‘Which one’s the happiest?’

‘Not the one I’m about to piss on.’ He mutters as he shuffles away to render the rest stop toilets unusable.

Allison wanders out to one of the fast food places. Her throat is dry as hell. Inside the thick smell of fried food washes over her in waves. Apart from the staff there are three other customers. Two men eating like it could be taken off them at any moment and a woman holding her takeaway cup against her forehead looking grimly at the clock on the wall. Truckers. Allison is sympathetic, her entire lower body is spasming in odd places from the hours and hours of sitting.     

There’s an old man in front of her in line, ruddy skinned and comfortably dressed, looking speculatively at the menu. When he looks behind his eyes are clouded with age and the skin of his face is peppered with spots and marks. Allison gives him a winsome smile and waits for her turn at the counter. Stiles arrives just as she reaches the front of the line.

‘One Super Splash, please.’ Allison says to the cashier.

‘What flavour?’

‘Green Apple.’

She leans against the wall and waits for Stiles to get his food. The Super Splash is like being punched in the face by sugar, she pries off the lid to look at it. Bright neon green. Cool.

The old man walks up to her.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’ The old man says, brushing his hand against her shoulder.

He exits the store leaving Allison standing there drink in hand. She takes a long loud slurp of her drink and frowns. Suddenly it tastes really bitter.

Stiles spins in to view with a nod and a smirk. ‘Nice, getting in there with the GILF’s. You get his number?’

Allison takes off for the car at a run. ‘Keep your kinks to yourself weirdo.’  

Stiles laughs and follows her, easy laughing until they’re back out on the road, everything stretching before them and behind them with uncertainty and promise. She drops the drink out the window of the car later, dark red liquid smashing against the ground.

\--

‘If you sing that song one more time I’ll crash your car.’

Stiles sticks his tongue out. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘I would.’ Allison says gravelly. ‘I would sacrifice all of us.’

‘We’re like three minutes away, the song is four minutes long-’

‘A lot can happen in ten seconds let alone a whole three minutes.’

The bright pink sign for Caulfield Air Strip tells her to turn left.

‘Less than two minutes,’ Stiles takes a deep breath, ‘ _and I would walk five hundred miles-_ ’  

‘How were you not drowned as a child?’

She lets him sing and pulls them into the parking lot. There are cars everywhere. She drives past rows and rows of them, all empty. There’s no sign of anyone. Allison frowns, parking lots with this many cars are _never_ empty.

She pulls them into a parking lot right near the designated entrance. Stiles bursts out of the car. Allison comes out slower and leaves the keys in the engine and checks her lockpick case. There’s a big welcome sign hanging over the one entrance to one of the old warehouses.

‘Anything seem hinky to you?’ She asks.

‘Maybe there’s a breakfast?’

‘It’s 2pm.’

Stiles shrugs.

Allison looks at the cars again. There’s discoloration around the bumpers, the license plates are fading, there are weeds growing around the tires. ‘The cars are old.’

‘Maybe witches are single handedly keeping second hand car dealers in business?’

Allison sighs and angles herself slightly in front of him. ‘Let’s try the building.’

Stiles grabs her arm and pulls her back. ‘Wouldn’t it be smarter to call someone?’

‘Who? The only person who knows where we are is Scott. It’d take them hours to get here.’

‘Uh,’ Stiles scratches his face.

Allison punches his shoulder. ‘Come on Batman.’

Stiles keeps shoulder to shoulder much to her irritation. The closer they get to the entrance the more obvious the trap becomes. There’s no sign of foot traffic, no smell of food, no noise but Stiles open mouthed breathing. Allison tenses her muscles, working out the kinks from being inert for so long.

From underneath the big welcome sign the warehouse seems dilapidated and empty. It’s full of trash and debris. Half the glass is smashed in and what isn’t is covered in grime and graffiti. Allison hesitates. They could just go back to the car.  

‘Lead on MacDuff,’ Stiles whispers.

Allison enters the building first. Nothing.

Stiles steps in after her.

The dust on the ground starts rushing toward him, sweeping up his ankles.

‘Shit!’ Stiles jumps up and down on the spot, ‘it’s cutting me!’

A few drops of blood hit the floor. The dust drops down like it never moved at all. The floor starts to pulse like a beating heart.

Allison grabs Stiles hand. ‘We should go.’

They turn to leave. Between them and the door are an old woman and an even older man. The woman has bloody hands and a hole in her chest where her heart should be. The man is missing his eyes. Both of their hands move up and down in unison. A thing forms out of the dust and the darkness of the shadows. It stands a foot and a half taller than her, writhing black spikes making a body with two glossy eyes the size of dinner plates. A witches spectre; spirits bound during death to a witches will.

The old man frowns. ‘We thought you’d come alone.’

‘Kill the spare!’ The woman shrieks.

Stiles rolls his eyes. ‘Really? You’re gonna go with that.’

The spectre shrieks, unholy and loud, and attacks them head on. Allison knocks Stiles down and moves forward to sweep underneath it. She has the queer sensation of her leg moving through thick oil. The spectre goes off to the side, swinging around at the last moment to try and get to Stiles. Stiles scrambles out of the way. The spectre goes forward in a straight line and then takes a hard right angle. Okay. It can’t turn.

The spectre heads for Stiles again. Allison picks up a pipe lying abandoned on the ground and times her attack for a second before it intercepts Stiles, then she throws the pipe directly through its head. It disappears.  

Allison goes over to Stiles. ‘Next time please just let them have their terrible one liner.’

He’s blotchy cheeked and indignant. ‘I-’

The spectre reappears and rushes for Stiles. Allison flips the pipe in her hand, pushes Stiles behind her and strikes at what she assumes would be centre mass. The spectre splits around her and reforms in front of Stiles. Allison turns and arcs the pipe up with her. It slashes through it’s head. The spectre shivers and disappears again.

Stiles eyes are wide and shocky. ‘What-’

The spectre rematerialises behind him and brings giant clawed hands down to clamp on his neck. Allison moves to take it’s head off again. It squeezes down on Stiles neck, mottling the fair skin there. Allison backs down.

To her horror the spectre doesn’t stop squeezing. It grows claws and tilts Stiles head back. The spectre shakes and shivers. It spasms and elongates into something monstrous. The top grows five times bigger than the body and forms a slit with teeth. A tongue slides out and drips down onto Stiles face, bathing it in shadows that ooze into his eyes and nostrils. Stiles pulls away from it, trying to kick and scratch. The spectre drips more ooze onto his face. Stiles stops struggling. The body grabs him and pulls his limbs out like he’s being nailed to a cross.   

Stiles eyes roll back in his head. There is a thunderous bellow from this throat. Like a lions roar or an evacuation siren. Allison hits the deck and covers her ears. All around them the debris smashes, the leftover glass in the windows shattering. When Allison peeks through her fingers it’s to see Stiles glowing with an otherworldly light, his whole body lit from within except for the shadows in his nose, mouth and eyes.   

‘What am I doing,’ Stiles says in an odd melodic voice, ‘what am I doing, Allison?’

Allison keeps the pipe in her hand. ‘Stay calm.’

Allison mentally checks her body. There’s no injuries, so she takes the chance of sliding her foot down ready to spring up. There’s another piece of debris next to her which she palms.

Steady breath.

She lunges forward like a bullet out of a gun, throwing the debris up into the monstrous mouth of the thing holding Stiles. It screams. Two spectres appear. Allison kicks straight into the mass and uses the momentum of the motion to flip through it, pipe forward to break the head. It dissipates and she goes into a roll, turning at the end to run at the other one. This time she dodges at the last second and grabs a half broken box to smash its head in with. It shudders before disappearing. Two more appear and she brings them down. Two more.

Three now, and her vision is getting hazing. She slips up while trying to decapitate one. She’s on it’s shoulders sinking into the dark mass, pulling off it’s head with the pipe in her hands. It dissipates but not quick enough to avoid the grip of one of it’s partners. Her legs are stuck and she can’t move. One of them wraps her entire arm, shoulder to fingers, in spectre ooze.

It twists her wrist. She drops the pipe. The darkness swarms forward and swallows it.

‘No!’ Allison tries to kick.

The spectres wrap her up in ooze and drop her onto the ground. She falls forward and the slime solidifies. There’s a spark and a smell. Like burning ozone. Then a woman walks out of the air, made of smoke and light. Her face is long and regal looking, her eyes are dark, and her nose is upturned just a touch.  

‘Mom.’ Stiles voice breaks, ‘Mom what are you doing here?’

‘Oh my baby. My sweet, sad, poor baby.’ The apparition comes closer. It shivers and behind Stiles mother is a huge black space, absolutely devoid of light and life. ‘Sloneczko. Teraz jesteś bezpieczny.’

‘What are you doing to me?’

‘I’m so sorry Mścisław. But it’s time now. It’s time to become like me.’

Stiles blanches and shakes his head. ‘No. No I don’t have to.’

She steps forward and solidifies completely, one hand gripping Stiles by the throat.She looks at her hand around her sons neck with an all consuming desperation. The dark thing behind her spasms. Her fingers twitch and clench down. ‘Is your father alright? Is he okay? Is he safe?’

Stiles claws at his mothers hand. ‘He’s fine mom. He still wears his ring.’

‘Don’t ever tell him.’ Tears fall from her eyes. ‘I’m sorry Sloneczko. I am so sorry for what we are.’

There is a bright, bright light and then Stiles screams as his mother rams her fingers into his chest, right where his heart is. Strands the colour of gold and white blue begin to form on the top of Stiles mothers skin and creeps toward her son. It wraps long thin strands and crawls over her body to get to him. When it touches his skin it shivers and spots appear; a mockery of his freckles. Stiles begins to convulse, his eyes roll back in his head.

The shadows binding Allison slide away and absorb into his skin. Allison runs forward the second she’s free and grasps Stiles arm.

Everything goes sideways. She feels the echo of Stiles transformation in her own body. The white blue and gold goes up his spine and skims her, electricity builds in the bonds of his skin, split and become dense and damp. Lightning becoming earth. His heart stops and hers tries to stutter out along with it. Stiles gasps and for a second he’s him and his eyes are so, so sad. Allison tries to take that with her too. Fingers along her face, tracing the path of tears, and then she’s thrown away from him, crashing into herself and away from Stiles.

She gets on her feet and just watches as he’s consumed by something she’ll never understand.

A rumbling from behind her. Allison moves to pick up an old broom somehow still in one piece. The shadows reappear, stronger and darker than before. Allison snaps the broom in half, takes the head off the other end and falls into position ready to fight. Six attack at once, stupid unless they’ve fought together before. They swarm her, trying to get at her from different angles but tripping over themselves in the attempt. Allison dispatches one easily, unlike before it stays down. One of them picks her up and throws her straight up. She manages to turn it to a flip and land hard on one knee. It cracks. She hopes it’s an old break and not a new one.

Allison regains her footing and twists out of the way of a new attacker. She manages to clip him with the edge of a stick. Another comes up behind her and tries to get a hold around her neck. She throws him off. ‘Stiles!’

‘I’m here!’ Stiles voice, reflected by the walls, is loud and deep.

Stiles lands on the ground and makes one wide motion with his hands. The spectres are gone.

Allison looks down at her misshapen kneecap, already beginning to bulge and change colour.

‘Just sit down Allison.’ Stiles looks tired. ‘I can fix it.’

She does sit down but makes a point to not hide her scepticism. Stiles sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks on it. He makes big slurping noises like he’s gathering a lot of fluid. After half a minute he turns and spits on Allison’s knee.

‘Gross!’ Allison tries to move away but her leg goes numb and she falls flat on her ass. ‘What the hell!’

Stiles looks meaningfully at her leg.

Allison straightens it out so she can get a good look. The pain is still there but it’s fading slowly. The saliva has turned to the same black shadows Stiles produced earlier. She would expect them to feel cold and slimy, instead it feels like windburn. No, that’s not right. It feels like her knee is being compressed, submerged, burned and thrown into a tornado at the same time. It doesn’t slow down so much as come to a conclusion; the feeling of dirt on bare skin. Her knee is perfectly healed.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘My inheritance.’

‘What the _fuck_ did you inherit?’

Stiles turns over his hands and stares at them. He spends longer on the bloodied knuckles, tracing over them with his eyes. Gingerly he lifts one bloody knuckle to his lips and licks, his finger comes away pink and healed. He does it to the next finger and again until his hands are clean and healed and his mouth is smeared with drying blood.

‘I think I just got my hogwarts letter.’

\--

‘It was a trap.’

‘Yep.’

Allison is driving again. It took them a long time to leave the building. Now they’re halfway home, all the hours Allison has paid attention and all the hours she’ll have to, to get home running infinitely through her mind. She’s so tired.

She grits her teeth. ‘By whom?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it was time.’

‘What are you?’

‘My mother was a witch.’ He shrugs. ‘Bled true, I guess.’

‘Which lineage?’

Stiles looks out the window.

‘Stiles.’

‘My mothers name was Mścisława.’

Allison mentally flips through her catalog of with names. ‘First or last?’

‘Only one she needed.’   

Allison lets it go. She needs another caffeine pill to make it all the way back in one go.  

‘Your dad doesn’t know?’

‘It’d kill him. He’s the Sheriff. A lawman. Finding out that his wife was not only a witch that used blood and curses, but that witch- I couldn’t do that to him. Neither could she.’

‘Does Scott know?’

‘He will.’ Stiles hand presses gently on her thigh. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For not just killing me.’

It honestly hadn’t occurred to her. She opens her mouth to say as much but Stiles has turned away, hunched shouldered and looking at the vista passing them by. Allison turns up the radio and puts them all in a little more danger by speeding.

\--

She sees Scott for the first time that summer outside Peter Hale’s apartment.

Anticipating he’d be there she grabbed him a coffee when she went to get hers.

Scott smiles gratefully at her. ‘This _barely_ works anymore.’

Allison smiles back, a little brittle, being around Scott always starts this rolling her stomach. They’re both full of possibilities when they’re together. Good ones and bad ones. ‘Trick of the trade; always put double the amount of caffeine as you think you should. Your liver and heart won't thank you but at least you’ll earn your heart attack.’  

‘You’re nervous.’

Allison leans against the wall opposite to Scott. ‘You’re meant to put a question mark at the end of that.’

He shrugs. ‘I know you too well.’

She sips her coffee. Allison before she went to the Lui’s and had the shit kicked out of her for weeks would have flirted back. She’s more calculating now, even if it’s just the tiniest bit. Scott raises an eyebrow and Allison takes another slow sip. ‘Not that well.’

Scott looks at her befuddled.

The door opens and Derek Hale ushers them into Peter’s apartment. It’s sleek and modern. There are what she recognises as Witches Thistles, the magic equivalent of a field bag, resting on a low glass table. It’s looks both expensive and well used.

Peter and Stiles are deep in conversation. Stiles is agitated, shoulders up, looking at a spot a little to the right of Peter. Peter is calm and predatory.  

‘Stiles,’ Scott walks up to them and steps between them, ‘Allison’s here.’

Stiles turns to look at her, blotchy faced and tired. ‘You didn’t need to come.’

Allison shrugs. ‘I want to help.’

Stiles nods. ‘So here’s the story.’

He tells Derek, Peter and Scott everything. Allison pitches in here and there where his memory is spotty or just inaccurate. Mostly he doesn’t need her help.

Instead she watches their faces and tries to gauge how they’re processing it. Derek is bored the way he always is around Stiles. Scott is listening a small frown marring his mouth. Peter is not listening to him at all, just staring a little dazed at Stiles mouth.

Something keeps telling Allison to pay attention to Peter, a little nagging voice in her head that says they’ve made a mistake.

‘And now you have your mother’s curse.’ Peter says, eyes dark.

‘The family bane, yeah. It’ll only activate if I kill someone.’ Stiles gestures to himself, ‘and really what damage can this do?’

‘I was around your age when I first met her.’ Peter says consideringly. ‘Have you contacted anyone about this? A coven she was on good terms with?’

‘No. There’s no one to teach me anything, or to tell me how to control this, or to do any of the things my mom was meant to.’

Derek frowns. ‘Did the training we did over the summer help at all?’

‘A little,’ Stiles shakes his head, ‘but this is...I couldn’t have told you how it would feel.’

‘I might have someone,’ Allison pipes up, ‘the Liu’s are meant to be experts on witches.’

‘The Liu family?’ Derek snorts. ‘They specialise in their own heritage.’

‘And witches.’ Allison looks him straight in the eyes. ‘Witches come from everywhere, there’s no ‘out of Africa’ theory.’

Derek bares his teeth at her. ‘And why would they help us?’

Allison lifts her chin. ‘Because I asked.’

‘It could be dangerous.’ Scott says.

Allison purses her lips. _And I can’t be?_

‘Not a problem.’

‘Allison.’ Scott says disapprovingly.

‘Scott.’

‘Go ahead,’ Peter says dismissively waving her towards the door, ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

Scott’s eyes follow her out the door. She closes it and walks slow and measured out the front of the apartment complex so the werewolves can’t hear her. This is it. This is her first decision as a Hunter.

Allison takes a deep breath.

No one picks up the phone until the fifteenth ring. Allison’s hands are shaking.

‘Hello?’ Samson says. ‘What do you want?’

‘Samson, it’s Allison Argent.’

‘Well, hey there Miss Argent, is this a social call?’

‘No, I need to talk to Maria.’

‘About?’

Allison stays silent.

Samson sighs. ‘Your dad couldn’t help you?’

‘He’s working on something else.’ Allison says, ‘I need some information we don’t have on a witch threat may have turned up in the area.’

‘And you won’t ask me?’ He says, hurt.

‘I need to keep this as small as possible. You _might_ know but your mother absolutely will.’

‘Alright Allison.’ Samson says carefully, ‘you’re on loud speaker.’

Ugh, The Lui’s with all their little challenges and tests.

‘Hello Maria.’ Allison grits her teeth to avoid putting any inflection in her voice.

‘Argent.’ Maria’s voice is soft and soothing. ‘What can we do for the _esteemed_ Argent clan today?’

‘Mścisław.’

‘The Mścisława is awake?’ Maria Liu says startled, ‘and you did not kill her?’

‘Him,’ Allison leans forward, ‘what is he?’

‘Truly your father tells you nothing. Teaches you to fight but won’t let you kill, lets you play at leading but doesn’t tell you enough to be affective. Poor parenting. If Victoria-’

‘My mother is dead.’ Allison growls. ‘ _Do not_ use her memory to hurt me.’

Maria Liu’s voice grows suspicious. ‘Don’t tempt me into it then. The Mścisław is a monster created in Europe like the werewolf. Unlike those your family so dedicatedly eradicates witches cannot be destroyed; only conquered. And briefly at that. Your boy is a human pestilence, a walking plague, a weapon of destruction so complete and amoral that he understands the line between friend and foe and _still_ does not discriminate among those he attacks. He will betray you, it is their nature. There are scarier witches, far more terrifying skinwalkers, more horrifying Fae, but none are as relentless or as ruthless as that family.’

‘What are they?’

‘There was a bloodline of witches in Poland who experimented. When they were good they produced brilliant minds that rethought and remapped the very nature of magic. When they were bad they were the embodiment of evil. They got into a feud with a lineage that no longer exists. They killed and killed and killed. After a century or two one of the sons of the Polish family fell in love with a girl from the other family. They forced him to kill her and use her corpse to kill the rest of her family. When it was done, and they left him with the desecrated corpse of his lover, he went into the dark heart of a black forest and used her still warm blood and dead heart to curse his own blood. They made him kill his love, kill her heart, and so they would be cursed for the next thousand years to birth only the monster they made of him. The traitor who kills and eats his kin; who would never stop hunting, not if you ran one mile or one million.

‘When the family was dead the curse remained. It does not take a millennia to kill around forty people. those distantly related enough to escape the killing part of the curse could not escape the birthing. They chained the monster to them with the name Mścisław and changed the course of the curse just enough to only infect the first born of the first born. Being witches, they then used the child as a weapon against their enemies, trained from birth with the understanding that they were an apex predator -an unstoppable force of death, relentless and ruthless.’

‘How did it end up here?’       

‘Margaret Stilinski,’ Maria sighs, ‘mass murderer and blood sorcerer, came hunting one of my family and then stuck around to have her baby.’  

‘Why?’

‘We killed a family of cannibal witches. One of their kin was married to a coven of German witches who had resettled there after the Disillusionment. They were originally from Poland.’ Maria says disinterestedly, ‘it was before my time as the Head of my family, so I don’t have the exact details.’

‘What do I need to know?’

‘Kill him. Now.’

Allison’s stomach rolls. ‘If that’s not an option?’

‘Hire someone to.’

‘He’s the son of the sheriff. Rule number 1: don’t do anything you can’t get away with or reasonably explain.’

She hears Maria’s fingers tap against a table. ‘You won’t kill him?’

‘It’s _not an option_.’

‘I see. Find a suitable coven and farm the boy off with them, if that is _not an option_ then find a binder and bind him to service.’ Maria hangs up.

Allison looks at her phone for a few seconds in sheer disbelief.

\--

That’s the end of it in terms of Allison being helpful.

Other things happen. Jackson dies. The Alpha pack turns up. They learn about the nemeton and the druids. Allison gets a bullet through her chest and has the fun of pretending she isn’t wounded at school for two days. Her father considers it a lesson on what Witches Brew can and can’t do.

More things pop up. They deal with them. So on and so on.

Maybe if she wasn’t an Argent things would be different, but as they stand her life becomes split into three parts. There’s the Allison that goes to school and maintains her grades, very good but not exceptional, noticeable but not noteworthy. There’s friend Allison who goes out with Lydia at all hours and has lunch with everyone out at Lydia’s beach house on weekends. Then there’s Allison the Hunter who spends her at home life reading and making tactical drills, reading about military leadership, going over survival skills and holding conversations about the political climate in countries she’s never been to with her father’s colleagues, all of whom should scare her more.

It should be tricky to maintain the balance. Instead everything drifts apart until no parts of her life overlap. The Scott and Stiles she see’s in school are not the one’s she see’s at night hunting for things. The Lydia she see’s on the weekends is not the one she texts at midnight when Lydia is pretending she doesn’t have nightmares. Her father is even different from morning to evening. In the morning he makes pancakes and hassles her about her homework. At night he fights her and leaves her tied up in an armored vehicle. He hugs more and kisses less.   

Allison’s never stayed somewhere long enough to have friends and she’s certainly never stayed anywhere long enough to feel the slow drag of those friends leaving you. She watches her life separate day after day, hand clenched against her thigh and teeth gritted. Maybe it’s just a part of growing up. Maybe people need you less.

Friday night, a few weeks before the end of the school year, and Allison smells burning through her bedroom window. When she looks outside there’s nothing but darkness. No winds, no rustles. Just darkness. That, and the smell of burning.

Her dad’s out hunting a few towns away. She packs up her bow and grabs the small pouch of her herbs and vials she takes with her everywhere.

Three calls go to Scott’s voicemail, and everyone else told her ahead of time they were going to be unavailable. She starts her car and pulls out into the night, headlights on full barely cutting the night. For 40 minutes she just drives around trying to see if the burning smell gets thicker. At no point does she see any other sign of life. No talking, no animals, no tv noise as she drives past houses.   

Her phone rings.

She pulls over to answer. ‘Hello?’

‘Allison? Alli-’

‘Scott? Scott, you need to repeat what you just said.’

His voice is jumpy, scared. ‘Stay home. Allison, go home. Now. Don’t come-’

The car jolts to a stop. Allison revs the engine. The car gets more stuck. She presses her foot down harder. The irrepressible night around her goes from eerie to sinister. The car jolts again and catapults her forward into the wheel. Her foot goes down and the car accelerates right into-

A burning clearing.

She slams on her breaks. The car skids to a stop with a series of thuds against the back wheels. Slowly she gets out of the car, bow ready. The clearing is brightly lit. There are fires growing crawling across the ground, over black lumps and rocks. The night sky above her is clear and leaning towards early dawn. Around the edges there’s a thin membrane separating the little bubble of fire from that awful night outside. Allison trips over something, one of the black lumps.

The lump groans.

‘Holy shit.’ Allison jumps up and notches her arrow.

‘Help me.’ The man extends a bloody leather gloved hand to grasp her ankle. His grip is weak.

‘I’ll help you.’ Allison crouches down and moves the man’s body so she can see the wound. A diagonal cut to the chest, hitting most of the major organs. He’s going to die.    

‘Argent.’ He licks his lips.

‘Yes I am.’

The man spits on the ground.

Allison reels back.

‘Allison!’ Scott calls. ‘Allison!’

She looks at the dying mans face. Angry, defiant eyes daring her to do...something.

‘Allison!’

‘Over here.’ She screams. ‘He’s dying!’

Scott appears through the thin membrane, full wolf face on, red eyes and claws out. She turns away from the man on the ground and runs towards Scott. He catches her in a hug.  

Allison pulls back first. ‘What-’

Boom

‘Not here.’ Scott pulls her around so she’s behind him. ‘Stiles is bringing the last of them in here.’

‘Where is here?’ Allison pulls on his shirt, ‘who are they?’

Scott shushes her. Allison lifts her bow, half a mind to shoot him, when Stiles comes crashing into the clearing, black clad hunters following him. Allison lowers her bow. There should be no other hunters in Beacon Hills.

‘Get ready.’ Scott says, and then he’s off. Allison stays where she is. She has no idea who to fight. One of the hunters turns into the light, she catches the lines of an aristocratic nose and eyes tilted up at the corners. Samson Liu.

Stiles ends it by throwing one hand in the air and slamming it down. The hunters fall to the earth, terrible wounds splitting them open. She see’s Samson rise and his skin sever. He smiles at her small, forgiving, before he slams to the ground, legs crushed underneath him.     

‘Samson.’ Allison runs to him and falls to her knees by his side. His stomach is sliced open. She touches it.

‘You should have killed him.’ Samson whispers. ‘You should have done it Allison.’

‘Hang on Samson,’ She tries smiling but it must look awful. Samson brushes her arm and then dies, the last of his breath wheezing out.

Stiles stops by her. Literally jerks to a stop beside her like he’s being tugged around on strings. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Allison rounds on him. ‘I could have talked to them-’

‘Wouldn’t have helped.’ Stiles says disinterestedly. He leans down to poke at Samson’s wound. Allison nearly kicks him.  

‘You already knew.’ She says accusingly. ‘And you can use your magic. How?’

Stiles shrugs. ‘Isaac.’

‘Isaac?’

‘His mom wasn’t strictly...human, either. Neat club we make.’

‘They know,’ she says, furious. ‘What you are.’

‘You told them.’

She breathes deeply once, twice, three or more times. It doesn’t dislodge the dead smell of Samson’s body or the burning of things behind them. When she’s calmer she talks again. ‘If I’d known they would do this-’

‘It’s fine, Allison,’ Stiles doesn’t smile. ‘This is mostly Peter anyway. He told the other witches. No offence or anything but they are way more of a problem.’

‘You can’t stay.’

‘No, you can’t.’ Stiles shakes his head. ‘Allison not killing me gets _you_ in more trouble than me. It looks like you farmed out your job to someone else. If you go now there isn’t a Hunter family here to report too.’

‘That makes it free territory.’

‘We’ve got a plan.’ He says quiet and sure, ‘it doesn’t work if you’re here. It doesn't work if they think we still care about each other.’

And she doesn’t get to know it. ‘I’d never have told.’

‘I believe you.’

That’s the conundrum, then. Allison is a hunter. Allison is one of _the_ Hunters. How does she live with the knowledge that at some point she is going to have to choose between the people she loves and the duty she was born to. It should be her friends, it should be her heart, but there’s people like her grandfather out there. People like Peter and Deucalion too. People like Kate. The only thing bad men need is for good men to do nothing. Allison can be better than her family but to do that she still needs to be one of them. If she’s good enough she can make sure none of this happens again. Maybe that’s why she didn’t fight the unravelling, the distance growing between her and her friends. One day she’ll be asked to choose, and she’s pretty sure knows what that choice will be.

But she can’t give up her friends.

‘I can’t imagine doing this without you.’

Stiles wraps her in his arms. He has stronger shoulders then she suspected. Allison sighs and leans in, letting him take her weight. She gets the sick feeling this is the last time they’ll be able to be just friends. He squeezes her tighter against him. Then he lets go.

‘You run.’ Stiles smiles this time, hand coming up to play with the edge of her hair. ‘You figure out how to be you, while we figure out how to be us.’

‘You’re my friends.’

‘We’ll still love you.’ He turns away, looking into the flames, ‘but you can’t stay with us.’

\--

‘I want to go to Paris early.’ Allison says over dinner.

‘Why?’ Her father raises his fork to point at her, ‘you said you needed to see this through with your friends.’

‘They’ll survive without me.’ She pushes her peas around her plate. ‘We’re not the same.’

‘No you’re not.’ He says. ‘You’ll leave in three days.’

And that’s it.

She spends the three days sharpening her weapons, breaking in her leathers, re-reading all the lore. No one talks to her. She understands they can’t be seen together, she understands that it defeats the whole purpose if they come with her to say goodbye. It just doesn’t mean much while she’s handing in her luggage. Her father leaves her before the plane is even called, tears in his eyes. She tries to hold that understanding to her as she watches him walk away.

She boards the plane. Lydia, Scott and Stiles wave goodbye to her in her head as she walks up the long white hallway onto the plane. She naps when she sits down, less from tiredness and more from a need to keep pretending they’ll all still be there when she opens her eyes again.

 


	2. these are the days that bind us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the best understanding of this chapter you should be somewhat familiar with 'which only hollow voices sing'. particularly chapter two.

\--

PARIS:

_these are the days that bind us_

\--

Samson was right; they weren’t cruel enough.

\--

‘You’re here because you are inadequate.’ A tall broad women says to them when they’re all gathered in the Val-d’Oise safe house. There are fifteen bright and angry faces around her. All of them have the same tall shoulders and straight backed pride she’s grown up around. It’s interesting how the few truths she’s been allowed have unspooled little things she’s taken for granted. She looks at them discreetly, and one or two not at all just in case someone would like to notice her noticing, and watches the pull of their muscles, the fit of their clothes, whose stockier where, and if they fight to type or have something unexpected up their sleeve. There are three boys and two girls she’s got her eye on. Two of the boys and one of the girls because they’re clearly physically versatile. The last two because they’re Argent allies.

Ashley O’Connor is tall and Indian. He’s got Scott’s dimple stuck on the right and a big fuck off scar on the left that curves all the way around his shaved head. He’s a heavy hitter, specialises in brute strength and weapons of precision, force and battery. The O’Connors have held sway in London for years, with the hunting coming down the fathers side. Most Hunter families are matriarchal but the O’Connors are an oddity; they marry for magic. Not witchery, not the bloodlines, but the small magics like clairvoyance and psychometry. Ashley has perfect aim, he’s been an active force since his mid-teens, at least according to what her father told her. He’s not remedial. He’s not an embarrassment. He’s not an excess child some family needs to kill off. He’s here for her.

Qui Mingxia on the other hand is the fifth child of an already overfilled family. The Mingxia are primarily weapons makers. Their close allyship with the Argent’s is common knowledge. Unlike Ashley who is the physical definition of unstoppable force, Qui is slight and smack on average height. Her hair is long and oddly curly, fingers always tapping out a rhythm on her thigh like she’s got somewhere to be. She’s what the Lui’s would have called a ‘Dancer’; likely good with short and mid-range weaponry, very flexible and agile, with endurance that would make marathon runners cry with envy. She wins her battles with cunning and tenacity.  

Neither of them look at her and she doesn’t look at them.

So here she is, no clue what to do, with a range of enemies both known and unknown to her standing at her back. There are mutterings all about her, some about her, some about people she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anyone.

They’re lead to the bunks. Allisons is medium sized and sparse, two beds and one set of draws, a mirror and a rough red and orange carpet. She’s sharing with someone but they haven’t deigned to grace her with their presence. After a shower and a snack from her pack she heads out to find somewhere to stretch and workout

Ashley catches her around the waist as she comes out of her room. Her first thought is to deck him which is poor treatment for someone her family trusts.

Ashley’s grip tightens. ‘Mścisław.’

Allison holds her chin up. ‘I couldn’t do it. It would have been wrong.’

‘Really?’ Ashley says. He throws her against the wall. She bites her tongue hard enough to draw blood. Suddenly he’s all there is on the horizon, taking up her vision from left to right. Her mind blanks instead of finding a way to fight back.

‘Yeah.’ Allison wipes the spit off her mouth.

‘Yeah.’ Ashley smiles. And then he punches her in the face.

Allison’s nose cracks.  

‘Bonne chance.’ He says with a carefree wave as he walks away.

She needs to learn. She needs to learn fast.

\--

The Musee du Montparnasse is the one place in Paris she wants to be after the first week of training. Humiliating does not even begin to cover it.

All week people have bitten into her. Talking about her father, her aunt, her mother. Looking for a way under her skin. She’s only gotten physical once, when one of the Moreau twins suggested her mother was too weak to save herself. Both of them will be able to walk again in a few days. She’s dreamt of her mother all this week. Sewing with her and always failing because she can’t keep it together. Her mothers face dissolves at the end always disappointed with her.

She’s dreamed of coming here for years but now that she’s actually standing in it, it feels hollow. She rubs her eyes and turns to walk out. She’s halfway out when she runs into someone.

‘Argent.’ Ashley O’Connor tilts his head. ‘What are you doing here?’

Right because he’s not following her. ‘What are _you_ doing here?’

‘Looking at you.’ O’Connor says. ‘We’re going to the Carpathians soon for wilderness training.’

Allison raises an eyebrows. ‘Yes.’

‘Just yes.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Dale Liu is a friend, and he thinks a lot of you.’ He looks her over. ‘You’re just a child.’

It’s stupid, really, how often people tell her she’s a child, how much she doesn’t know, how stupid she is, and then they all turn around and demand adulthood. ‘Nothing really prepares you for this. Not really.’

‘You’re not cut out for this at all. It would’ve been easier if you’d grown up in this.’

‘What do you see when you look at this painting?’

‘Colours. Shapes. Good brush strokes. I’ve always been a modernist.’

‘I had art catalogues stashed under my bed when I was 13. I’d taken art classes up until then but my parents wanted me to focus more on real things. Archery, gymnastics. My dad took me hunting a bunch of times so he could teach me about guns and ammo and my mum taught me how to sharpen knives, sew things and hold my ground. I think she was teaching me how to fight just as much as the Lui’s were, just without using those words.’

The next bit feels heavy on her tongue, huge in her throat. She’s going to lie, now, and take the first step towards being who she needs to be.

‘Werewolves killed my mother, and I can’t forgive that.’ Half a lie, her mother is dead because of werewolves, but she was killed because of traditions. But that can change, and it starts here. ‘So maybe I’m not you, but I am an Argent.’

\--

The Carpathian’s go well, so does Libya and the Maldives. Ashley gets over whatever it was that was bothering him, when he’s not throwing punches he’s actually quite pleasant. It’s between that and Manila that Allison begins to get a hold of what she’s being taught here. Most of the time it’s about adaptability; the ability to move in different locales and environments as if you belonged there. The ability to strike out from any place, any position with absolute ease. It’s also about knowing the cultural differences between both the locals and the local supernatural. Every place has it’s myth and every place has it’s myth killing. It’s just as important to know how to mourn the dead in the appropriate way as it is to know how to kill. It’s a way of teaching honour in what could be an utterly honourless life.

Knowing that lets her know more about the people she’s here with. If Allison is the daughter of the Argent blood than those she’s here with must be something similar.The range of nationalities, the range of skills and training. They travel constantly which she realises is to give everyone the option of touching base with contacts and allies. Allison, lacking these, uses it to take meticulous notes on everyone elses connections. When everyone splits off to do their own thing at the end of a fairly ease mock hunt she travels into town to check out the markets. To her surprise someone joins her.

Her training partner and roommate is Qui Mingxia and they do not get along. Qui is messy where Allison is neat. Calm where Allison is passionate. She has no use for anything that isn’t immediately useful -she doesn’t like movies, or art, or music. But she does find one point of commonality.

Qui Mingxia is an iconoclast  

‘That’s why I was sent here.’ Qui says quietly as they walk through the marketplace. ‘My family make weapons for Hunters and Hunters only. Swords, knives, bows. We’ve set the standard for the last 100 years. I made the mistake of telling my mother I thought we were standing still and that we should expand into trade like other families have done. After all your families done well off that.’

‘Even if we are just merchants.’  Allison says dryly. One of the very first things Qui had done when they found out they were rooming together was make several digs at the somewhat nouveau riche status of the Argent wealth.

‘The Argent name’s only become a powerhouse since the Disillusionment and my family is still living some 50 years before that.’ She says apologetically. ‘My family believes in the old ways. Cutting off heads with swords and witch hunts.’

Allison makes a non-committal noise.

‘You need to understand.’ Qui says fervently. ‘This is life and death. You should hate that which will kill you.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Free will.’ Allison says firmly. ‘You can always find a different path if you try hard enough.’

Qui snorts.

Instead of arguing Allison pulls a scarf off of a vendor. It’s pale peaches and cream. Perfect for her soft complexion. ‘What about this one, then?’

Qui tilts her head and then they’re off. Not hunters, just girls shopping in the late afternoon sun.

\--

April 23rd, 2013 starts for Allison in the woods outside of the Quebec compound drinking shit coffee as the sun edges over the horizon. In another timezone those same moments of light illuminate the end of the world as both sides of the supernatural war know it.    

\--

They call it Jeremiah

They’ll say its from the bible but those old enough to keep the histories have the truth. Jeremiah Ottinger was a surveyor for the Wasserstrom family 300 years earlier. He was largely mediocre, good with the large details but always leaving one or two things out from sheer forgetfulness. The Wasserstrom on the other hand we’re professional hunters and arrogant, they suffered no mediocrity in spirit or blood, but the Ottinger family had been their friends for decades and they used Jeremiah Ottinger. One day the Wasserstrom family went on an expedition to find a small colony of supernatural pests. They followed Ottinger’s maps and took heed of his warnings and when they’d made two days journey they realised Ottinger’s mistake. He’d drawn a valley and a forest and said that the creatures must surely live in the centre. Where else could they possible be? Instead the monster was the forest. Ottinger had never gone all the way in, simply noticed the way the valley got denser with trees, where it dipped, where the water would run. He made his conclusions quickly and without looking at the height of the tree’s -how unnaturally tall and thick they were, that no matter how the sun shone the dark never shifted, the smell of exotic fruits and the ticking of small insects that never, ever ceased. He noted none of this.

The Wasserstrom kept on due to the sheer nature of their own arrogance and came upon the centre of that valley; a huge carving of man and beast combined sitting on a throne of semiprecious stone. The King of the forest. When they gazed upon them he gazed back. He saw them for what they were. Hunters. Arrogant. Coated in the blood of his kin both supernatural and mundane. So he made them into monsters and he set them loose but he let them keep their minds, to know what they were and that now they would hunt their own.  

In the Hunter’s version of the tale, a coalition was formed to rid the forest of it’s King. After all there’s no power more dangerous than change and nothing scarier than the ability to take your enemy and make it your kin. That coalition became the first Hunters council, and although the council was officially disbanded in the early 20th century as a concession to ending the Hunter-Witch wars, the families involved remain close allies.

This is a story Allison was told by Kate when she was five. She imagines the story is different for children who aren’t Hunters.

They’re told this again as they travel by plane to where they’re keeping the hostages. We’re they’re keeping Lydia. The people chosen for this mission are from those families. Half of them will go to play diplomat with law enforcement and government, they other half will do their best to keep this quiet on the ground.

‘Argent,’ Javier FitzPierre says, ‘you have a personal interest in this?’

‘A friend of mine. She was involved in a resurrection and is immune to all supernatural powers and magic. They must have mistaken her for-’

‘You know Lydia Martin?’ One of the others, Spanish by the accent, says, ‘I always wondered who mucked that up.’

Allison shuts her mouth. Goddamnit.

Javier frowns at all of the them. ‘We’ve been given special dispensation to rescue her.’

Allison was going to do that regardless. ‘Thank you.’

Javier gives her a heavy, considering look. He nods and looks away.

The boy sitting next to her, as tall and wide as a tree with a voice to match for all that he’s 15 years old, asks. ‘She as hot as everyone says?’

‘Way hotter.’ Allison whispers.

\--

Her hands keep spasming against the floor. No matter how hard she tries she can’t get the nerve endings to understand that she has a nail embedded in her palm. She’s listening hard for the goddamn asshole that did this to her in the first place. She know’s he’s off his head on drugs he didn’t choose to consume but he’s still a kappa with a nail gun and astonishing aim.

‘Javier!’ She screams. ‘Javier!’

‘Here,’ Javier leaps over something and pulls the nails out with sheer brute force. He’s got a hole in his arm and gashes on his legs. ‘Next hallway over.'

Allison’s already rolled onto her feet. Her hands are out of commission so she tucks them into her armpits and moves. Two men from the security force protecting the facility leap out. Javier covers her, shots loud over the sound of the alarms. There’s no one between her and Lydia’s room. She works through the pain to open the door to her room.

‘Lydia?’ She calls quietly.

In the room are seven beds. Three are occupied. The one closest to the door is breathing in and out softly, whomever is occupying it is far too big to be Lydia so she moves on. The second bed is buzzing, actually buzzing like its filled with bee’s. There’s goo oozing from underneath it. God she hopes that’s not Lydia. She approaches anyway, knife in hand.

‘Ally?’ The third bed says. Allison turns. Lydia is lying in a mess of her own fluids. Her hair is mussed and her face is mottled with sores and marks. There’s bruising on her arms from restraints. Her eyes are trailing lazily around the room, stopping in the corners.

Lydia stays still on the bed. She’s barely breathing. And then she comes alive all at once. She moves in a spasm falling off the bed in a heap and crawling towards Allison.

‘You came.’ Lydia begins to cry. ‘No one else did. No one came for us.’

‘Lydia-' The second Lydia registers her voice she blanches and turns around, crawls back into the bed, pulling the sheet over her head. Shit, they do not have time for this. Allison goes to tug the sheet off Lydia’s head but she just holds tighter. Her head pops out, eyes wide and terrified.

‘Sweetheart, you have to get up.’ Allison says gently.

Lydia begins to shake her head wildly from side to side.

‘Lydia.’

‘Go away.’

Allison pulls back the bedsheets. There’s blood down her sides from where she’s rubbed away her skin. The bottoms of her feet are dirty and blistered. She leans forward to gather Lydia up. Lydia strikes out at her.

‘Don’t touch me.’ Lydia hisses. ‘Don’t look at me.’

Lydia’s shaking so hard Allison can feel it from a foot away. Slowly, cautiously, she places one hand on Lydia’s shoulder. When Lydia doesn’t throw her off she curls it around her and tugs her off the bed and into her arms. Allison lowers them carefully to the floor and tugs the blanket off the bed so she can wrap it around them. Lydia shakes begin to subside the longer they’re touching. Eventually she pulls back and puts her head in her hands and cries.

She wraps her arms around Lydia and whispers. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

She walks Lydia out like that, safe between the blanket and Allison, whispering ‘I love you’ all the while.  

Whatever Javier might have said -whatever the other Hunters might have said, about Lydia dies a solemn absolute death as they fly back to Quebec. Lydia’s still too dignified to cry but she can’t help the way things spill out of her; what the injection did, the horrible monsters she see’s in every corner, even Peter and how the scars still hurt and she still dreams of him. Lydia falls asleep somewhere between hours one and three, the violent hallucinations still happening in her dreams. If it were up to her Allison would never let one of her own be exposed like this, but the plane is too small for anywhere to be safe from other peoples eyes. The Spanish girl looks at Lydias hand crumpled into a fist bruised and yellowing and turns her head so no one see’s a tear slip from her eyes.  

 _Good_ , Allison thinks ruthlessly, _let them see what it’s like on the other side_

\--

Lydia’s reaction to the Jeremiah Serum is deemed moderate to mild and therefore not in need of any medical attention.

‘She’s hallucinating!’ Allison screams at the doctors one too many times. ‘How can this be mild?!’

Ashley pulls her away. ‘Thank you.’

Allison turns on him the second they’re alone. ‘It’s worse than that.’

‘Apparently not.’ Ashley says patiently.

‘They don’t know anything about it.’

‘No they don’t.’

‘You’re an asshole.’

‘Okay.’He puts his hands on her shoulders. ‘I got Qui and Lissa to help your girl up to one of the apartments we keep for family.’

Ashley forcefully turns her and pushes her down the hallway. She gives him a one fingered salute.

The apartments are deep in the compound. Only ever used for families who come to watch over their kin as they die or to collect their body when they’re already dead. It’s two floors, kitchenette and table downstairs, a long hallway as a bottleneck and then a nice three room apartment. For some inexplicable reason you walk right into the bedroom from the hallway. It’s one of the dumbest security set ups she can think of.

Lydia is sitting on the bed with her hair loose about her face. She’s staring at one of the windowless walls like it’ll open its secrets.  

‘I’m so scared.’ She says after a moment. ‘I don’t know what to do now.’

Allison crawls on to the bed with her. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I love you.’

They lie like that for awhile, arms around each other, Lydia telling her mean things about the girls she went to college with. Allison half listens with her eyes on the door.

‘Argent,’ Ashley says from the doorway, ‘you’ve got review with Gulash in the morning.’

‘Gulash is not his real name,’ Allison says to Lydia’s raised eyebrow, ‘and this is Ashley O’Connor.’

Ashley observes Lydia silently and with great predatory intent. Lydia twirls a bit of hair and smiles blankly until he’s done, then she returns the favour. Only when they’ve both deemed each other acceptable does Ashley leave. He walks slowly, probably because he’s aware of what a good ass can do to a pretty girl.

Allison turns a little to hide her smile; mating rituals of apex predators.

‘He’s cute.’ Lydia observes.

‘More you than me.’

‘I had a boy.’ Lydia shrugs, Allison knows that one. Lydia switching from one conquest to another. ‘He was okay, I guess.’

‘Was he cute?’

Lydia scowls and something eases a little in Allison’s chest. ‘I don’t do _cute_.’

‘’Course not.’

Lydia taps her foot on the floor. She gathers herself, some pillows, and an abundance of bedding and pushes it onto the floor. She crams herself into the corner and turns her back to everyone else.

‘Jackson was worse.’ Lydia says as she curls into herself on the floor. ‘Jackson was so much worse than this.’

She falls asleep right after that leaving Allison awake to brood.

She goes downstairs to eat and stretch. After she’s finished reviewing the bestiaries she lies down on the floor with a cup of tea. She thinks of somewhere safe for Lydia, and conjures the dark woods of Beacon Hills. Not for it’s lack of monsters but for it’s abundance of angels. She thinks of it as safe, maybe Lydia would too.

Decision made she pulls out her phone.

Scott’s smile is easy to her over the line. ‘It’s good to hear from you.’

‘You too. I have a problem.’ She lays out Lydia’s situation.

‘I-’ Scott sighs. ‘Allison. Do you have any idea how many refugees have fled to Beacon Hills since April? They’ve torn apart the entire safety net from Washington to Nevada. Even with your dad and Stiles and Derek we are barely keeping our heads above water. If we took in someone as high profile as Lydia _from you_  people will see it as us picking a side.’

‘True Alpha,’ she says, ‘you can do anything.’

‘Allison.’ He says gravely. ‘I can’t afford to take in a refugee from a Hunter stronghold.’

‘It’s Lydia-’ Allison’s voice rises, ‘after everything else don’t you think she deserves this? What happened to the boy who would do what’s right!’

‘And what happened to the girl who’d do anything to protect her friends! The Hunters are destroying the Houses! We lost South Port and Hyacinth and the European Houses are being razed as fast as people can light fires. What did you think the government would _do?_ You told them we we’re monsters! You came up with this- this genocide!’

‘We didn’t do that.’ She spits. ‘We didn’t make the fucking-’

‘But you didn’t stop it either.’ He says calmly. ‘You’re not stopping it now.’

‘Scott.’

‘I can’t Allison.’ His voice breaks. ‘I _can’t._ ’

‘Fine.’ Allison snarls into the phone. She throws it across the room.

If the point of being a good leader is merit, if the thing that separates you from the lesser monsters is kindness and strength of will, if the only thing you have to work with is your own belief in good and the goodness of the soul, if those things are true and you still fail to save someone...

Allison never expected Scott to fail her, is the thing. She never expected to fail.

She picks up her phone, dusts it off and goes through her contacts. Half formed plans flutter through her head. Where can she send her? What can she do?

She sighs and puts her phone down. She can go upstairs and ask what Lydia wants.

Lydia is sitting by herself in a torment of bedding, books and weaponry. Her hair is pulled up in bunches so she has better access to her face. Her silver and blue dressing gown in bunched oddly and falling off a shoulder. In front of her make up is arrayed in some divine formation only Lydia herself could make sense of. Gold dashed on her eyelids, black eyelashes, plump pink mouth. Allison doesn’t believe in war paint -camouflage has always been her thing- but watching Lydia try to make sense of herself she has the pressing urge to smudge it, make it violent, make it something that scares. All that red and glitter saying _I dare you to try and take me_.

‘What’s going on Lydia?’

‘Nothing’s wrong Allison.’ She dabs make up from the corner of her mouth. ‘It’s all perfectly fine.’ She finishes with a touch of blush. ‘See? There’s nothing to see here.’

Lydia rises from the mess she’s made of the floor and slips off the dressing gown so she can gaze at herself naked and defiant. Allison thinks of Venus rising from the foam, of Judith slaying Holofernes, and see’s it for what it is. Lydia is angry and hitting back the only way she knows how.

Good. Anger is survivable.

Lydia looks at Allison over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you think it’s time to go?’

\--

‘The Mingxia family travel a lot by necessity and they hire outsiders to work as go betweens. No one will wonder why you’re there. They’ll probably have you do some work for them but you’re a civilian and they have a reputation for excellence so it won’t be too dangerous. They’ll keep you safe until this blows over some more, and then they’ll take you wherever you want to go.’

Lydia wraps her scarf around her head and secures it tightly. She’s gone Audrey Hepburn today. ‘What’s the catch?’

‘It can’t be North America, not for another year. Even then you can’t go back to Beacon Hills. Not unless it’s life or death. You can’t contact anyone there, not even your family.’ Allison smiles sadly. ‘Not even me.’

‘I-’ Lydia’s face crumples. ‘Thank you. I never want to go back.’

‘I’ll see you in a year.’ They embrace and Allison holds on so, so tight. ‘Time to go.’

Lydia leans back and presses a dry kiss to Allison’s cheek. Then they’re parted and Allison watches Lydia Martin walk away into a new life.

\--

‘Heads up,’ Ashley says looking over her head at the door, they’re in a secluded section of the compound cleaning weapons, he’s watching one entrance and she’s tracking the other. ‘Argent Patriarch at your 6.’

‘There are no patriarchs, just me.’ Allison says quietly. ‘Weapon or no weapon?’

‘Negative.’ Ashley reassembles his gun and stands up. ‘Catch you first, Argent.’

‘Not fucking likely, O’Connor.’

Ashley saunters away laughing. Her father takes his place and quietly unholsters and disassembles his own weapon. He takes her spare rag and sets about cleaning.

‘I didn’t think you were going to show up so soon.’

‘Circumstances have changed.’

‘Have they?’ Allison looks up at him.

Her father’s eyes are solemn and longing. He must see some difference in her. Allison sure see’s some in him.

There are the little lies children tell themselves about their parents. About how kind or smart they are. How much they can protect you from. How often they were honest, kind or cruel. Christopher Argent’s little lies are spinning apart.

Allison sighs and puts her rag down. ‘Dad, just tell me.’

‘There’s going to be an inquest into what you did.’

‘They told me too.’

‘They expected you to refuse.’

Allison opens her mouth to argue and then snaps it shut again. Think it through, think like one of them. Hunting is a xenophobic profession. Of course the Jeremiah Virus would seem like an excellent idea. Allison is the figurehead, however useless, of one of the most influential families in the world. A very conservative family, for all that her parents were the equivalent of Hunter hippies. She showed her true colours.       

‘I can’t fault what you did.’ He says.

Allison looks at the wall behind him and says nothing.

Her father hands her, her papers. ‘You’ll be staying from now until the Maes get here. They’ve agreed to take you as an apprentice.’ Unspoken is his worry for her. What they’re doing to her here, how the hell she’s going to make it through now that they know she’s not really like them. That she has _sympathies_.  

‘Dad-’ Allison grabs his shoulder. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For trying so hard.’ Allison leans close enough to hug him tight and quick, ‘I love you.’

Her father manages a small bittersweet smile. ‘I love you too, sweetheart.’

\--

Instead of throwing her to the wolves they pull her in closer. They push her harder, try to bend her to the mold. She’s saved by the presence of others. By the support she has in Ashley and Qui, the unspoken understanding that the Argents stand with allies.  

Of course these people are like her. They’re observant. First they send Ashley home for a few months citing a recent death in the family. Next they demote Qui so they no longer share rooms. They find reasons to keep her away; for longer training, for harder endurance exercises. Finding any angle they can to drive a wedge in. Qui stays by her side whenever possible.  Allison gets better, she gets harder, faster, stronger. She gives them no room for disappointment. She says the right things and she makes it all believable.  

Still they find a way.    

‘Argent follow me.’ Pinay, one of the trainers, calls out at the end of sparring.

Qui graces her with a sardonic eyebrow and takes her training bag from her.

‘What is it?’

‘Congratulations. You’ve been chosen for special training.’

‘In what?’

‘Espionage.’

Her blood doesn’t run cold and her face doesn’t lose colour. She gives them no reason to see how shaken she is. She leaves a note for Ashley, for her father. Espionage is notorious for its ability to turn out hunters who are the best of the best. Zealots for the cause with all the skills and cruelty to back it up. It’s an honour. It’s the end of Allison’s life as she know it.   

Qui is sitting quietly on her bed as she packs. Allison looks at her large array of weaponry and takes only what she values. ‘I’m leaving you my weapons.’

Qui’s lip curls with disdain.

‘I know, yours are better, but I can only take what I can keep on my person. You have to sneak into spy camp.’

‘I don’t think you should do this.’ Qui whispers. ‘My sister...’

Allison looks at her curiously. Qui never talks about her family.

‘Xifeng was the eldest daughter and Bolin is the eldest son. She chose to become his advisor, his secret keeper. They took her away and she never came back.’

‘She died?’

Qui smiles sadly. ‘No, she just never came back.’

Allison kisses the top of her head. ‘I’ll come back.’

Qui tilts her head, giving her that weary look again. She nods twice and lets Allison leave in silence. Later, when she’s slipped into Bordeaux and is well on her way to the rendezvous, two things occur to her; that she’ll be starting from scratch again and that was most likely the last conversation she’ll ever have with Qui Mingxia.

\--

At orientation dinner she sits across from someone, and next to someone, and behind someone else. She doesn’t bother to look at them, or assess them, or do anything that isn’t required. The food is bland.

After orientation dinner they take people downstairs one by one. When it’s her turn she hesitates at the door an old feeling coming back over her.

‘Wait.’ Allison licks her lips. ‘I’ve already done this. I don’t need to go again-’

‘It’s alright.’ Someone places a soothing hand on the back of her head. ‘Interrogation training is standard. It’s alright.’  

No, it’s not.

‘It’ll be easier this time.’ And there are those cold hands on her body pushing her forward and wrapping chloroform around her mouth. ‘Who knows, you could be one of the ones to enjoy it.’

\--

Lights. Lights and lights and noises flashing in her head. Metal on metal. Wood on flesh. In flesh. Over it and under it. Lights and lights and water. Dark and dark and fire. One pain ends and the next starts in parallel, in eternity.

‘What do you know?’

‘Who are you?’

‘What are your plans?’

Lights and lights and lights. She waits for the questions to split. To lose meaning. For anything to be like it was the first time. They toss her on the floor, they electrocute her, they flog her. They take away her name and her dignity and then they piss on all of it. They burn her. They drown her. Still she’s there, with those lights and lights and lights. The lights that make cracks all over. Make something she can’t come back from.

She feels her skin fall apart when they hit bone and all that dreadful light falls out. She tells them her name, and her plans, and her loves and hates. She talks until her tongue is heavy and she tastes blood.

And then they do it again.

\--

It’s in her room later, when she looks herself in the mirror and see’s nothing but bruises and scar tissue, that she begins to count it as then and thereafter.

\--

Everyone talks about the Blur.

It’s a good thing. It means you can do what they say. Be what they say.

‘In the field you’ll begin to disassociate. Don’t fight it. What we teach you is different from the standard training in that we cover the less savoury parts of the job first and all the fun stuff later. No playing dress up, or learning funny accents until we’re sure you can respond with lethal and accurate force. When the time comes your body will know what to do, even if your mind hasn’t caught up yet.’

It’s simple, her Trainer says when she’s in the ring, two enter and you fight until one of you is incapacitated. The longer it takes you to make the final blow, the longer they’ll have to take going over you in the interrogation rooms. After all, a lack of killer instinct just makes you a liability. Her opponents are stronger most of the time, but occasionally they throw in a complete civilian.   

She does it ten times and she’s so close to utter failure. She can’t handle another interrogation session. She’s too close. So close to being too hurt, too broken, too weak to be of any use to anyone. To feeling that she’s nothing. She doesn’t know what she’s fighting anymore. Is it behind her, in front? She just knows that until she lets them bend her she’s going to be here. Not out there helping anyone or saving anyone. She feels her fingers clench into a fist and instead of holding that thing inside her back from lashing out she leans into it.

It makes sense when her fists connect with flesh. A sense of bone deep relief at finally hearing that positive noise from them. She won’t be going back down to that room later. As a blow lands on her ribs, snapping them, she feels almost euphoric because she understands. She gets it.

And then it’s so easy    

‘Good.’ Her Trainer makes some notes on the pad. ‘Report for your first recon mission in the morning.’

Good. She looks at the bloody woman under her fists. She can see bone and flesh, parted skin and veins. She’s got fangs and claws. She’s dangerous. It’s good then that Allison is too. The woman sputters and coughs, a high whining noise rising from her chest. Broken ribs. Punctured lung. Bruised heart. Allison notes her soft palms and weak grip. Her low tolerance for pain. Allison didn’t have to hit nearly as hard as she did.

 _Coward_ , something else says, _cruel and cowardly._

 _Good_ , everyone else says. _Good and right and true._

 _This isn’t who you are_ , that something else says, and Allison turns her head away from it. Can’t bare to hear it.

‘You did well,’ the Trainer says, and Allison has to believe them. She has to.

\--

November 21st. 5.32 am, Paris. Outside a bar.

_A group of Romani witches were murdered just outside Paris earlier this morning. You’re to gather intel and figure out if the massacre was supernaturally motivated or committed by one of the local Hunter families. You will meet with a representative from other interested parties. You are to engage with civility but be prepared for escalation at all times. Do you understand, Argent?_

I do.

_Do you understand the consequences of failure._

I do.

_Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent._

\--

We hunt those who would hunt us.

\--

The homes smell like burnt blood, piss and old food.  

The police tape is trampled in places, they’ve only got the site for a few hours before it’s officially taken over by the local Hunter family. Allison’s heard good things about the Maes’ fanatic but not unreasonable. She arrives early and takes a look out post a hundred metres away from where she assumes the meeting will take place. It smells like arson from here. What was once a collection of houses and caravans has been reduced to so much rubble. She can see half burnt curtains and what she suspects is a childs doll, pink and frilly. There are corpses too all curled up and charred. Those are harder to look at. From the other side a lone dark figure approaches. She finds her binoculars and looks.

_Ah shit_

Stiles walks calmly and efficiently towards her stopping thirty metres away to wave his arms in the air. ‘Yo Allison!’

She rolls her eyes.

As she walks towards him she notes the changes. Stiles has grown his hair out to the point where it’s begun turning into curls. He hasn’t shaved for long enough that he has patchy stubble up and down his neck. He’s dressed in dark clothes and one of his customary hoodies. Over his shoulder is a knapsack filled with witch goodies judging by it’s stains.  

‘An American in Paris.’ She mutters, rubbing her hands on her legs.  

Stiles grins. ‘I came on the Polish passport. I’m here to represent Baptiste House’s interests and to see if we can identify who and what set this fire.’

Allison nods and walks past him into the burned rubble. Up close it becomes obvious that the people living here were a mixture of mundane and supernatural. Unusual for a city but Paris is overpopulated. She walks them to the centre of the ruins where she assumes the fire started from. There’s a room with all four walls still standing and no roof. It stinks of propane and something else. Three walls have normal scorch marks, the fourth looks like a giant sigil.

‘Witchcraft?’ Allison asks.

‘Yep.’ Stiles replies, pulling off his rucksack. ‘Good ol’ Witches Brew No.3. Available basically everywhere.’

‘How are you?’ Allison leans heavily against the door, angled to press a healing rib out of harms way. She got it coming into Paris.

‘Well as can be considering what your grandfather is up to.’

‘What is he up to?’

Stiles eyebrows go up. ‘You’re kidding.’

I’ve been locked up for most of this year. ‘We don’t get much news.’

‘He’s started his own crusade in the USA going town to town and killing any supernaturals he finds there. The governments basically supporting it given what happened in April. Some Hunters are helping, some aren’t, but they’re not trying to stop him.’

‘Bastard.’ Allison spits. ‘And my father?’

Stiles smiles instead of answering the question. Allison lets it lie, she can find that out on her own. ‘What?’

Stiles laughs softly. ‘You sound very Parisian.’

She harumphs and turns to look back over the bodies. Stiles walks around the room, idly ghosting his fingers over things. He stops at the wall the fire started on. There’s a thick ugly scar on Stiles throat exposed by a stray wind. The part of her made in the dark whispers about how x marks the spot. How she can stop him right now before he says something. Before he does something.

‘Do you ever think they planned it this way?’ Stiles licks the wall, just a dart of the tongue and a glow in the eyes. ‘You and me with the family destinies. Our loving Scott.’

 _Danger, Danger._ ‘No.’

Stiles ignores her. ‘A divine plan in three parts. Your centuries of righteous killings. My centuries of depraved ones. Scott not killing anyone ever unless motivated by extreme circumstances. It’s twisted isn’t it-’

Allison marches across the room and punches him hard in the face. His nose gives way under the force, mucus and blood sliding towards his mouth.  He falls back, flailing, back to being unconscious of his body the way he used to be. Stiles doesn’t respond to the pain but does stick his tongue out for the blood. ‘The old you wouldn’t have done that.’

Allison wipes off his blood with disgust. ‘The old you was smarter.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘No.’  

‘Do you miss any of us?’

‘No.’ She lies, clearly, so he gets the point.

‘Do you miss Lydia?’

‘Lydia’s fine.’

‘Is she?’ Stiles eyes spark gleefully, ‘where?’

Goddammit. ‘I don’t want to have the rest of this conversation.’

‘We have to.’

‘I’m trying to do this without hurting you. Any of you.’

‘I really piss you off.’ Stiles steps closer. ‘You’re being brainwashed.’

‘Right, unlike you and Scott who are doing a bang up job of not letting a force of nature eat your souls.’

Stiles tilts his head, clearly wondering how she knows that. Allison keeps her chin up.

‘It’ll take some time for the Maes to get here.’ Stiles sits on the floor. ‘How did we get here Allison?’

‘You and me? You and Scott? Me and Scott?’

Stiles hand rubs his face, comes away with a sigh, ‘What if we hadn’t started this?’

What fucking if. Allison doesn’t do what if. ‘How long are we stuck here for?’

Stiles checks his phone. ‘Two hours yet.’

‘Did I ever tell you how Jackson died?’

‘What does this have to do with that?’

‘We’re going to be here for a while anyway.’

So Stiles tells her. When he’s done he looks different. Not younger or older but more solid. Like naming his guilt removes the doubt.

Allison flips the blade in her hand through her fingers. ‘You can never tell Lydia.’

‘Keeping things from her is one of the things what started the lot of us on this particular path.’

‘It haunts her, it keeps her furious, and that keeps her alive.’

‘Doesn’t matter. She left.’ He stabs the ground. ‘Can’t blame her for that.’

‘What do you think lead you and me here?’

‘Texas. Peter. Kate. Me. You.’ Stiles puts both hands on the wall. He’s always had large hands. He says something in a language she doesn’t understand. A huge swell of magic crashes into the room, all the elements at once covered by the smell of dirt and rot. ‘Somethings going to happen soon, I don’t know what.’

Awhile ago she and Stiles sat in a stolen van for hours and hours. Jackson was alive, her mother was alive, no one had any magic and Allison had no idea how much her punishment her body could take. How much it could ache.

Stiles moves along the wall until he’s standing behind her. ‘What?’

‘Looking at you hurts.’ She says simply. ‘I forgot.’

He braces his hand on her back, where her heart is, ‘I still feel it sometimes.’

She refuses, outright refuses, to give a moment of pain to his magic.

Stiles finishes his spell. His hair is blown up by the wind, his cheeks are stained with dirt and mess. He looks alive, horribly alive and vibrant. She catches a reflection of herself sharp boned cheeks and her dark eyes. Watching him, watch her. She doesn’t tell the truth. It’s not that invisible scar that stretches across both of them that makes her hurt. It’s that she looks at him and thinks what if, what if, what if.

‘You have to believe me when I say this is necessary.’

‘Washington State Hub, 14 killed. Rosewater House, 8 killed. Hyperion West, 23 killed. Apollo East, 5 killed. Killian Hugh House, 31 killed. Those were your territories, right?’ Stiles scowls at her accusing tone. ‘I believed in Scott too.’

‘You don’t now?’ Stiles says. ‘You don’t think at least trying is the right thing to do? Where were you, then, Allison? Where were you when we tried?’

‘I don’t...’ Her throat tightens with anger. ‘I don’t...’

‘Or maybe,’ his voice drops low, ‘we should all just give up and become exactly what they said we should be.’

Stiles presence is relentless and she takes it like a beating. Adrenaline rushes in her ears and she gets so angry. How can he not know? How can he not understand? It’s true. It’s all true. She’s a Hunter. It feels good and she feels strong and right when she does it. Isn’t the point to be enough to survive, to thrive? Isn’t this the right path?

But then there’s his dark eyes, his horrifying depth of depravity, and she feels it twinned in her. What are they that they can stand less than five metres from each other and switch from hunter to prey so easily? That the balance between them is so close. They can’t both be right. They can’t both be allowed to live.   

She goes for her knife. Stiles stumbles back from her, hands coming up to defend himself.

‘I-’ Allison starts, but she can’t come back from it. There’s nothing she can say to undo what they both know. She might actually do it.

‘Okay,’ Stiles sounds tired. ‘Okay Allison.’

‘I’m not-’ Over Stiles shoulder a light has bloomed. A house fire burning hot and bright. She can hear shouting. ‘What’s that?’

Stiles turns. ‘That’s Baptiste House. What are they shouting?’

‘The Maes.’ Allison feels her heart drop. ‘The Maes are burning Baptiste House.’

\--

_In Loving Memory of_

_Chris Argent_

_1969-2014_

_Protector of the Weak_

__

\--

She goes back into training immediately after...after.

There’s someone waiting for her in her room. She introduces herself as Allison’s new handler.

‘So you trust me.’

‘You didn’t do anything we can’t undo.’ Her handler says, ‘we’re all you have.’

Allison looks at the floor and wills herself to fall into her grief. Her father’s dead, her mother’s dead, there’s no one left but her. She doesn’t fall and that’s all them. Always pretend you’re strong, never show a moment of fear, become a mask and then let that mask become you. That is her now so instead of falling apart she looks ahead and wills herself to nod. Become nothing. Become whatever they you want to be.  

‘You didn’t crack.’ Her handler continues ‘We needed to know if the training would hold.’

She nods.

‘We’ll look after you now. Your training’s been doubled since you missed so much time. You’ll also begin interrogation training too. We think you could have a real talent for it. Your rooms will be isolated for awhile and then we’ll be cycling you around the new recruits.’ Her handler walks over to her and places hands on her shoulders in a  mockery of friendship. ‘One thing: you should have killed Stilinski.’

She nods.

She didn’t kill him. She was meant to and she wanted to. It was a mistake the first time around. She should have corrected it. If she had...

_It would have been wrong_

Maria Liu didn’t think so.

_He was your friend_

But he’s not now and he is so much more dangerous.

_It would hurt, deep down_

There isn’t anything there, they took it, they refilled it.

_Maybe this isn't strength_

Then this is survival and that has to be enough.

_Would your parents have wanted this for you?_

She can’t honestly say they wouldn’t have

_They loved you_

And now they’re dead

\--

She bends, she bends, she breaks.

\--

This is the story of the first time she takes a life:

It’s the weekend, and the sun is hot, hot, hot on the back of her neck. She’s wearing white as a concession to the weather. Her hair is dyed blonde, her eyebrows are not. She follows her mark helpfully named John Smith -not a joke- to his home. He lets her in when she pretends to be from a local church. It’s a wildcard of a cover but Allison is pretty and she has a nice smile. John Smith is a werewolf, an omega, and he may or may not have done something to deserve this. This is not her decision to make.

When John gets up to make a cup of tea, Allison follows him. She’s dipped this knife in wolfsbane already. One swipe across the throat and that’s it.

‘What are you doing?’ John’s eyebrows crease. ‘Why do you have a-’

Now, that voice says, you kill.

She swings the knife up, John blocks her and gets a hand around her throat. He squeezes tight enough for her to see stars. She gasps. He pushes her against the counter and tries to pry the knife out of her hand.

‘You don’t have to do this.’ John says. ‘I’m not a monster,’

But he is, isn’t he? She’s meant to kill him. She slices his hand long enough to get the knife up to his throat. John’s grip tightens painfully. She gasps again and her grip jerks across his throat, blood spraying everywhere. Allison drops to the ground gasping for air. His blood leaks through her clothes to her skin, her bra, in her mouth.

John jerks again and goes still. The life floats out of his eyes flashing from brown to yellow and back again.  

Allison Argent isn’t a monster, she’s a weapon. She is the antithesis of weakness.

Her hair falls into her mouth, rubbing her tongue and teeth as she throws up. She stands. Pulls the man’s head to the side and looks at the gash. Tries to feel more than a tug of repulsion and curiosity at the wound. She almost wants to touch it.

She takes his fingers, for the fingerprints in the old register, burns the rest as per protocol.   

‘Gerard would be very proud of you.’ Her handler smiles, ‘the women in your family are always so accomplished.’

Allison nods and plans her next meal. Chicken, rice, vegetables. She has left overs from earlier in the week.

Catching the train is the same as yesterday. Drinking her coffee is the same as the day before that. On her bicycle riding to the library her fingers are tight and sure on the handles. She hums as she makes dinner and when she thinks of the dead body her mind shuffles it, removes all the red and the gore and replaces it with an understanding. This is her duty. This is her right as an Argent. She is judge and jury. It is her right to hunt those who would hunt her.

Her knife stops sliding across the board. The room fizzles like she’s being pushed underwater and then clears as she begins to cry. Her hands dislodge her make up as she rubs the tears away. She resumes cutting her vegetables.  

\--

~~_Kill Two: Marcia Henrique_ ~~

~~_Kill Three: Joseph Mohamad_ ~~

~~_Kill Four and Five: Priyanka and Mortimer Hughson_ ~~

~~_Kill Six: Lucian Blake_ ~~

\--

His name is Roman Pozzili: he is thirty five, middle management, and the illegitimate son of a wendigo and a soul eater.

That’s a hyper aggressive flesh eating monster wearing an ill fitting suit to a nine to five day job he undoubtedly hates. There’s got to be a joke there.   

They’re going to kill him not because of his domestic abuse charges, not because he sadistically tortures his dog, his daughter and his wife, but because he might know something that one of the Argent allies doesn’t want getting out. Allison follows him at a safe distance.  

And it’s not that she’s unfeeling. She felt rage watching the man beat his dog, his wife, his daughter. She felt sadness watching the dog crawling away, whining for forgiveness. She felt contentment when she stood outside the Opera Garnier, watching the daughter and the wife take turns with a hazelnut ice cream. It’s just when her steady hands turn the bow to the man, to the werewolf, they don’t shake. When her hands turn to the beaten wife they don’t shake. When her hands turn to the daughter.

In her head is just the unwavering certainty that she is doing the right thing; that this is what she was meant for.

She rolls over his sweet redheaded wife and see’s someone else entirely.

Her mother’s hair was never long. When she was a child she believed it was a stylistic choice. Older and bloodier she knows it was because her mother loved practicality far more than aesthetics. Danica’s long beautiful hair is wrong on the sharp angles of her mothers face, the clash of red on red is too severe. Roman’s face has transfigured to her fathers. Younger than when he dies, younger than when they first moved to Beacon Hills. Allison clenches her hands and turns to Renee. Renee has turned from blonde to black, from golden to the paleness of Allison’s own youth. Lips smiling unafraid, looking for all the world like she’s sleeping with good dreams. Allison turns away from that too.

They told her this would happen. The Lui’s. That as cold as they would make you, as used to being the balance of justice as you become, there will be moments where your fears will take you. They talked about it like it was a psychotic break, but later when she was sitting alone Maria Liu herself came and found her.    

‘Hunters hunt. Hunters kill.’ She said. ‘And sometimes our souls can’t take the killing. Your mind will try and hurt you, but if you choose this, if you choose the hunt, you must stay the course.’

She looks back at the corpses again. Roman Pozzili. Danica Pozzili. Renee Pozzili. Buster.    

She takes their fingers for the database, pausing only to grip Renee’s tightly, trying to show the compassion she didn’t in killing her. As hard as she grips she can’t make the feeling strong enough. She can’t make herself sorry enough. Her fingers shake when she closes Renee’s eyes.

_Stay the course_

Later she stops at a local cafe holding an open mic night. There are people her age, who look like she does, singing on stage in front of a crowd. There’s a blonde girl jumping up and down with her friend. For a moment it’s her and Lydia up there singing...who knows what. They haven’t talked for a long time. She switches it out with other people she knows but none of them fit.

Her apartment is the same set up she has in every city. Spartan, emotionless, plain as possible. Shoes come off and she lets herself slide down the wall instead of sitting on the bed like she has after every mission. Hand pressed to her heart she strains to remember the last feeling she had. All she gets is Renee’s face as Allison when she was younger. How closing her eyes was like waking up to something horrible.  

At exactly 4am her handler calls.

‘We have a new mission.’

‘No,’ she whispers.

‘No?’ Her handler says archly.

‘No,’ Allison looks at her hand and feels a rolling shame consume her then leave just as quick. Her head is dizzy. ‘ _No._ ’

‘Allison-’ She hangs up the phone.  

It seems simple after that.

Methodically she packs up and burns her apartment. Her contacts are deleted, tears apart the passports given to her by her father and dumps the blood money outside the door of a father of three who outlived his wife but may not outlive his bills. She bleaches her hair to a shining platinum in the sink. She does her eyes big enough to see from a block away then smudges it so she looks older, tired, like she hasn’t eaten in a day and then some. She changes her body posture to the jittery tapping of an overworked public servant then to the borderline mania of addiction. Finds her middle ground. In Paris it would almost be chic.

The restless hands get her outside without anyone following her, the eyes get her to the front of the line in the airport, the lip biting and the stammer make sure that no one wants to talk to her, to look at her. The name on her passport is Allison and it will be destroyed when she lands in Budapest. It’s a short, short flight but her jittery disguise holds her tightly through to a hostel and then a hotel and then a hostel again just to be sure that she isn’t going to be caught. She hopes the racing bottomless feeling of withdrawal and a dawning epiphany about how close to rock bottom she is, is something that will slip off with the disguise. She pulls her hair down from its bun and begins to take bits and pieces off her disguise. At the end of it is the same sinking feeling she’s been portraying as hunger and tiredness.

****  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for reasons of not wanting to repeat myself the part covering chris argents death will be covered in a different story


	3. i will become what i deserve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the longest chapter of my whole entire life. also here's the [mix](http://8tracks.com/sazzafraz/we-can-never-look-back), which i feel isn't much of a spoiler anymore.

\--

BUDAPEST 

_i will become what i deserve_

\--

Some things about living alone: her laptop is always broken, no one ever visits enough, she never has enough money, everything is terrifying. There is a really good theatre three blocks away that she’s never even been to. Good things include being able to stray from the diet she’s been on since she was five, she never has to talk to her family if she don’t want to, if she wants to spend all day in her underwear eating knock off junk food, getting off, and reading pretentious threads on reddit she can. The only person left to judge her is herself.  

Budapest isn’t easy. Allison wears her way through the bustle and terror of being a foreigner in a series of Doc Martens and a new found addiction to shitty soap opera’s. Her family money went to buying both. She’s learnt fast that if you’re going to be poor you better have decent footwear. If you want to cope while being poor you better have a shiny distraction.

She doesn’t have to be, of course; there’s mercenary work to be had should she be able to stomach the call but she’s got just enough together to cover her shitty apartment. Lately she’s been thinking about who she wants to be and how that fits with who she can be. The arrow stained on her back is a target that gets clearer and sharper every day. Soon enough the teeth and pain of her history will suck her in. Right now, she can be a girl doing cash in hand work at the seedy bar in the back of an abandoned building that crumbles around her a little more everyday. She can be another girl on another reddit thread scrolling past pictures of penises when she’s bored between shifts. She can buy three packets of chips and eat them for dinner instead of something her parents would approve of. It’s a tiny life for someone with a legacy for bones and fighting for marrow. One size fits most, utterly banal.

Normalcy is banality, she’s allowed to indulge.

Saturdays she shoves on three pairs of socks and walks her way around District VIII. There’s a small group of artisans working on reviving one of the more delicate buildings, an old church three quarters dead but brushed with strokes of beauty; a pillar desecrated with childrens scribbling worn away to reveal the stone underneath, a portrait in a back room of a red-headed woman in blue, twin staircases leading up to an old bell tower, wood worn in the middle by steps toward a long gone pulpit and stones scrubbed with praying knees. The artisans are local and if she’s quiet they let her sit on an open section of the abandoned stairs.

Budapest is how she learns how to be. The step and her coffee and the low cheerful voices are the foundations for understanding the things that have been her and only her. History and colour and the bitter taste that lingers for moments, for years, after you’ve crumpled up the cup and thrown it away. It’s building a remembered self from things you can’t tell people. That only exist for you.  

She finds that her hands are chapped and blistered. Hard and growing harder every day with her workouts. She has never had soft hands -not at 6 or 16- and 26 will have the same worn fingernails. She decides her favourite colour is red and then green and then that the only colour that is real and true is the faded pastels of the crumbling church, the fading strokes of someone else’s faith. She decided things only to discover that freedom of choice is the right to change your mind. Your likes and loves. The very understanding of self.

Her reflexes are quick and sharp. Just as fast as werewolves. Teaching her brain to make the same snap decisions is a much harder task. You can’t grow back your empathy. You can’t look at creatures- at people, no matter what they might turn into under the dark of night- as meat and just turn it off one day. It would be easy if it was hate. Hate dies hard but it does die. Indifference, especially indifference dressed up as doctrine, as a right to the lives and bodies of those you deem your enemy, will not be reasoned away so easily. You don’t see the faces anymore because they don’t matter. The difference between them and you, your natural position of authority, is as natural and immovable a conclusion as the necessity of breathing air.  

So she’ll build up from the bottom. From the worst, dirtiest things she knows about herself. All the sick twisted things that live at the bottom of everyone. Instead of washing this out with rationality she’ll make her indifference as unnatural a thought as cannibalism or voting for a conservative party. Her brain will try to shift her back to the path of least resistance. Use fatigue, anxiety, restlessness, anything to push her back toward what it already knows and stay on the path of least resistance. Allison will give it nothing to work with. They broke her to make her and in doing so taught her to make herself. She is not broken, only being remade one silver sliver of thought, one reminder of life and beauty and love at a time.

\--

She has a date

Wait, no, she has an _opportunity_ to have a date

It’s a weirdly nostalgic feeling to have sweaty palms. She’s just outside a bar, worrying about her fake ID, pressing the edges of her thin short skirt in her fingers, when a breeze picks up the skirt of the girl in front sending it over her head. Allison’s the one to pull it down, exchanging genuine laughter as the other girl gathers the material in her hands and walks inside. Allison smiles to herself, skin tingling from normal things, as she turns to check her hair in the mirror of someone’s car. Her hair is still blonde but her eyes are their natural colour.

Inside the bar she feels at once out of her depth and utterly at home. There are pretty harmless men and prettier women playing pool, talking, trying to reel someone in to take home. A little part is dedicated to a dance floor and it’s in that direction Allison heads. She spots three couples and a threesome, two male one female, grinding on each other out of time with the music. Allison finds a corner and starts something by herself. Hands ghost along her ass and she’s pulled into the threesome by one of the men. The woman turns around, she’s pale red hair and sharp blue eyes, shorter than Allison even in her heels.

‘I’m Martha.’ She pulls Allison in by her hips and starts a slow steady pace. ‘And you want me.’

‘Okay.’ Allison says, and later leads her out the door and into the street. Allison is closer by a while and she ducks her head to avoid the mean spirited stare of her next door neighbour. She pauses at the door, fingers brushing the lock, but she pulls it together and opens it. Martha ducks in behind her and stands in the middle of her small one bedroom apartment. Allison bites her lip. Does she like women? Does she like men? Does she care? What an absurd question to ask yourself. She likes-

‘Are you actually going to talk to me?’ Martha smiles coyly. ‘Because I could be talking to someone else.’

‘Sorry. It’s been awhile.’

‘Awhile is fine, never is a problem.’ Martha’s long red nails tap out a challenge.

Being the brave sort, Allison leans into her and brushes her lips along the edge of Martha’s jaw.  She makes a catalogue of what her mouth likes, where feels best, where skin glides against skin and she feels sparks. But it’s detached. A clinical observation. Martha doesn’t have a blemish on her, her skin is thin over her veins from habitual drug use, when Allison grips lightly she shivers because she thinks of pain as a game, not a tool. Where Martha touches Allison is dictated entirely by where she thinks Allison responds, leading her along like Allison’s a lost little duck. Her hands slip over Allison scars and press only where it’s soft, when she’s passing something she understands. Allison writes this in her memory out of habit and plans accordingly. This is how to disable her. This is how to kill her. This is how you touch now.

Allison disengages. ‘Sorry.’

Martha shakes her hair over her pretty pale shoulder. ‘Not into girls.’

Allison smoothes the bumps on one pert nipple. ‘You’re pretty and I’m...’

‘Complicated?’ Martha says ruefully.

Allison sighs and inclines her head. ‘Sorry.’

Martha shrugs it off. ‘Don’t let whoever they are hold on to you too long. You’re too pretty to be alone.’

Allison grabs on to that. She’s only ever slept with one person and then they left each other and betrayed each other, and maybe she just hasn’t dealt with it. It might not be anything bigger. Maybe thats it, maybe she’s just in love with the boy she left behind.

\--

Ella is her seventh date. The others don’t go so well.

See, she said she was going to use light to purge out hate. She said that, and she meant it, and she’s trying. Date number two has a tick that makes her jumpy. Date four is a wraith, unblooded and no danger, but by the time deserts rolled around Allison has her fingers clenched so hard on her thigh she’s bruised from the want to hurt him. Date number six walks her home and she has this irrational urge to scratch her face off, only to realise that her perfume is the same as one of the woman she’d killed.  

She tries, is the thing, and she can’t make a goddamn dent in it.

Ella is a friend of a friend and Allison meets him because she wants to go to an avant garde show that only starts at midnight. The light friendships she’s made will stand up to drinking, to not talking about her family, to morning coffee. It will not allow her to drag them to a not very well lit area of the city in the middle of the night.

So Fiona finds Ella, who is a boy sometimes but not hugely attached to anything, and he agree’s to meet her for snacks and a show. Ella is willing to meet any number of people in dark places at ill advised times.

Allison shaves off half her damn head, because who cares, and splatters bleach on what’’s left. She looks like a hyena and gives herself permission to make one joke about her clitoris. She takes a few knives, but she thinks it’s a measure of progress that she can leave most of it at home. That is progress, right?

Ella is late, so Allison goes in on her own. It is...yep, it is very weird. The tent has deliberate holes in it to let the night air in but they’ve been ripped by hand and so the’re oddly shaped and ratty. There are beautiful half naked people with clearly deliberately pebbled nipples dancing slowly on furniture to the sounds of random household objects being hit with pieces of metal. Someone has made a playlist of what is clearly a combination of a man pissing and masturbating to the beat of the latest misogynistic top 40 hit. It’s probably about gender roles. Maybe because of the weirdness that it is so clearly pointed at being discomforting, Allison finds it riveting.  

‘It’s beautiful.’ She says to herself firmly.

‘Queer shit is, love.’ A big man, and she means big in most definitions of the word, trundles over to her. He is roughly the size of the man Fiona told her to expect.  ‘Ella.’

Allison curtsies, then feels awkward about it. ‘Charmed.’ Which is just as bad as the curtsy.

Ella smiles.’They walk around for awhile and stop at one of the displays. Two people are tangled up in each other, the insides of a broken clock hanging from their joints and between their legs. They twine around some imaginary object, always touching. On the top beat of whatever it is they’re moving too, one of them bends themselves in half until they can touch the ground, the inner bearings of the clock rolls down their torso and onto the ground, somehow gently, and the performers fall gently too. Ella whistles appreciatively. ‘Look at that.’

‘I can do that.’

‘Can you?’

‘Sure.’ Allison says agreeably, ‘but what do I get if I do?’

Ella laughs like a duck with a violent nose blockage. ‘Are you asking me back to yours, love?’

She is. Just for now.

Ella’s hands are thick, some from fat, some from the rough nordic features he’s inherited along with a father’s egyptian heritage. Allison is like the moon shining on rocks compared to him, pale and peppered with old scars. He loves to read to her. He loves to tell her poems.

‘ _Autumn sliped into Paris yesterday_ ,’ he sings at breakfast, ‘ _came silently down Boulevard St Michel_.’

  Somedays Allison sings her own back ( _You can’t say it that way any more.  Bothered about beauty you have to come out into the open, into a clearing_ ).

They have sex outside her apartment, her face to the stars as she comes. She leaves awful scratches on his back with her nails.

‘Come see me again.’ she says after every time, because his nose is lovely and long and she’d like to kiss him.

Ella doesn’t smile, but his eyes twinkle a little. ‘Alright.’

That’s the start of something. Ella cooks. Ella hates jazz. Ella always walks away from sex shaking a little from the way Allison rips him apart with just her hands. He comes back twice as enthusiastic.   

‘You can be a lot of fun, Ally A.’ He says, solemn mouthed but happy eyed. ‘But you’ve got a real sad face.’

Allison kisses his shoulder and wipes off the blood from his back and under her nails.

Ella is it for her, for a while, and she’s ecstatic about that. They move into his flat because it’s half a foot bigger and the rent is almost 10% cheaper. The bookshelves come first and are soon stacked with novels and the posters Allison steals from all the museums in Budapest and then the ones they visit while driving around when they both have the time off.

It’s okay. It’s normal and human and okay.

Then the questions begin: _Where are her parents? How did she become so wealthy at such a young age? Why does she have such a thorough knowledge of weapons and politics? Just what was an American girl doing in Europe by herself at 17? You scream at night sometimes, you scream and I can’t understand why._

She lies to him, holding the truth behind her teeth, feeling this ache she’d never expected. _Being normal means never having someone understand when you weren't._

One night she wakes up, heart pounding, a nameless thing stirring and stirring in her chest. Ella’s asleep next to her. Skin to skin with him she feels paranoid. The longer she closes her eyes the worse the feeling gets until it’s like eyes on her naked skin. They have sex like usual before they both leave for work. Allison has him under her hands, has him in her sights, notched between her legs like any other arrow, and she lets go like she always does. His blood spills under her nails and they come together as one before falling apart.

She leaves while Ella is in the shower and doesn’t stop moving until she’s situated somewhere else in the city, newly minted brown hair and green contacts irritating her, with no poems on her shelves.  

\--

She gets listless. Like she’s not moving fast enough. Her jobs get boring, her apartment gets stale, everything is the same over and over again. So she quits her job and takes up a short gig as a photographer for someone’s Uni magazine. They don’t even bother to check that she’s actually enrolled there.

It gets better marginally. She’s pacing the streets at all hours, looking for clues, looking for things to capture. For awhile she takes up with a group of kids a few years younger than her who climb up tall buildings and landmarks without safety harnesses to take breathtaking photo’s. She does it for the thrill first; they dare each other higher and higher and when one of them succeeds at getting over a new railing or five metres higher they cheer and drink and dance. Then she gets hungry for it. One of the girls, Sylvia, is delicate and balanced. She’s the only one who routinely climbs higher than Allison. Unspoken they partner each other, Sylvia guiding Allison through the parts she can’t think around, Allison pushing Sylvia when she reaches her limits.

‘You climb like you’ll never fall off.’ Sylvia says looking up and up at their next conquest. Her voice is heavily accented. ‘I would not like to be like that.’

Allison frowns. ‘Why?’

Sylvia’s hand covers hers, brushing her knuckles. ‘Because you will fall, sweetheart. Everyone does.’

Allison never quite manages to look Sylvia in the eyes again.

The Uni loves her photo’s but worry about what she might be doing to get them. She’s charming and guiling about it and occasionally just a little too fast, a little too close to scary. Once she’s started that way she can’t stop, every smile is a little predatory, every photo is a little too daring, like she’s pushing them to say something, anything, about it. Everyone let’s it go.

One day it all clicks: it’s the taste of blood and hunting, the chase and the kill. She misses the action of her old life. With no weapons and no targets she’s found a way to twist everything else to give her that rush. Back to being a blade. She quits her job, leaves her friends, and goes back to that same aching day in day out grind of mundanity.

Except now that she knows she can’t stop. Now that she has free time she spends it rediscovering those skills, reveling in the feeling of accomplishment when she figures out peoples secrets, when she knows what they’re hiding, when they’re a little bit wary. She can’t stop.

She can’t stop.

\--

She dreams. She dreams. She dreams. Christ all fucking mighty, all fucking above, how she _dreams_.

Her mind is fighting her. It’s snapping. It’s breaking. It’s turning the light in the middle of the day to the dark of the Lui’s basement. To torture. To torturing. Her dreams hold her down and put the knife in her hand and make her enjoy it. The dreams have her waking from the middle of a fight, soaked between the legs and terrified of herself. For herself. The dreams remind her of what she was made.

What she might not be able to un-become.  

\--

Karl is blonde and tall and handsome in a sharp way. Allison follows him home one day for practice, cup of coffee in one hand, scarf in her pocket to disguise herself in case he turns around. She’s found that targets are more likely to notice you if you duck or turn away, hide yourself in different clothes or change dramatically. Tie a scarf around your head, cover your forehead slightly to change the shape of your face, and they can’t see a damn thing.

She picked Karl because he’s punctual and she wants to be home for the news. He leads her down past a local centre where he stops to talk to the social workers, then to the grocery so he can buy white rice and tuna. He stops once at an illegal firearms dealer and makes some exchange she doesn’t manage to see. She drops further back for caution. His beautifully angled face only turns behind him once as he walks into the door of his apartment. She catches his dark eyes staring at the dumpster across the road. He smiles. Then he disappears from view. Allison sinks back into the shadows and waits overnight on the street for him to go to work in the morning.

It’s beyond easy to break in after he leaves for work. Karl lives on the third floor of a five story building, middle window, with his lounge room facing toward it. He doesn’t have a TV, he has a radio set to a news station. He only eats rice, tuna, and a heavy potato bake she’d bank on belonging to a grandmothers recipe. He has three pictures of his family in places guests look first, meaning he likes his family but he doesn’t love them. His bedroom is starched clean and nothing holds more than a whiff of living. Karl eats boring food, doesn’t talk to his family, has generic taste in books. So what is interesting about him? Why does he need a gun?

She notices a small dent in the floor of his study and when she tugs up the rug. There it is. His secret. Floorboards badly replaced and in a different coloured wood. Slight variations in the staining around it. He’s pulled it loose a lot and not cared that it leaves marks. Sloppy. Her prey is sloppy.

Allison pulls out one of her knives and opens the boards. Underneath the floor is a metal box. In the box are three knives covered in old blood, duct tape, a USB shaped like a lightsaber, a white stained gag and a length of barbed wire which is curiously clean. Allison has seen enough fucked up shit to guess some things, but she’s hoping to be pleasantly surprised by Karl. Maybe this is only for use on himself. She loads up the USB.

Allison sighs. ‘Karl you disappointing sick headed fuck.’  

She doesn’t watch the whole video, just sends it to a burn account and throws the original away. Karl doesn’t have a TV because he’s always watching his previous kills or planning his next one. Allison searches his house again this time looking for the signs of a devolving sloppy sadist. This time around she notices that his mother is the centre of all the family photo’s. That the books he has, while boring and generic, are machismo guides. Misogynistic.

The bookshelves are arranged strangely, at first she thought it was because he wanted the maximum amount of light possible, but the building next door gets in the way of that. So what is he looking at? First she thinks its the tenants next door, picking out victims. Karl’s not brilliant.   

Karl lives alone. Karl’s life is the equivalent of a free to air TV package. Karl gets off on brutalizing women and throwing them away. All of Karl’s family photo’s centre on his mother. Karl is a sick piece of shit whose whole life is centered on doing sick shit things. Why is he looking out the window?

His window has a perfect view of the building across the street, a alleyway, a dumpster-   

The dumpster. He’s looking at the dumpster.

Allison packs up the apartment, walks out the back way and takes a turn around the block before coming to the dumpster. She slides her leather gloves on and gets to work searching through it. Big piles of nothing and vomit. She’s so busy being disgruntled and disgusted she almost misses it. One of those enviroment friendly bags with dark splotches on it jammed between the back corner wheel and a wall. Impossible to see...except from the exact angle from Karl’s apartment. She yanks it loose, expecting trophies, expecting more weapons. Instead she finds furs, pelts, the smell of the salt and sea.   

Selkie skins.

She pulls one out of her hands and feels the rush of magic straighten her spine and make her stand straighter. This one’s dead. She pulls out the next one and actually feels it, the horrific torture, the rapes and the violence. It throws her back to that dark room in the basement. When she was debased and waiting for the next hit. The next skin is warm and responsive. Pleading. Begging.

There’s a skin market going through Budapest. Not surprising since it doesn’t have a hunter family or a House to protect the supernatural from the scarier parts of humanity.  

There’s something hungry in her. There’s something terrible in her that needs to build and destroy. Maybe it’s the Argent legacy reaching through time to show her the way. Maybe it’s years of bloody knuckled fighting waiting for the chance to strike out at something again. She’s walked like a ghost since she’s landed in this city, moping, feeling sorry for herself. _She’s a monster. She’s a killer. She’s a Hunter here to kill everyone._ There’s a scared girl out there and that girl needs Allison to stop moping and use all the skills beaten into her.

Maybe what Allison is doesn’t matter; maybe what she can do does.

Allison stuffs the dead selkie skins back under the dumpster and takes the live one back upstairs. Would it be better to surprise him in his own hallway? Or maybe sit outside? The opportunity for surprise is greater if she goes inside the apartment, but so is the likelihood that the situation will escalate. She picks outside and hunkers down to wait until he comes home. Her eyes close and she lets herself fall into a half sleep. She snaps fully awake when she hears the rustle and click of metal. There’s Karl. She looks at him without giving him any indication that she’s noticed him.

Boy’s got a gun.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Karl says. ‘Paulina saw you in my apartment. You’re a police woman. You’re here to catch me.’

‘Hi Karl, I’m Allison. How did you find out about selkies?’

Karl clicks the safety off his gun. He’s shaking it all about. He’s a shit shot, she can tell.

‘Come on,’ She says conspiratorially. ‘You’ve always wanted to tell.’

‘Go away.’

‘Not until you tell me how you knew.’

‘You want in, that it?’ Karl snarls. ‘You wanna sell your ass to someone? I won’t pay you for that.’

Allison stops playing for a second there, something flicks up in her and looks at Karl. Bares its teeth and sharpens it’s nails. ‘Where’d you find the selkies?’

The gun stops shaking, maybe he isn’t such a bad shot after all. ‘A friend of mine told me where they bring in exotic women. I thought I’d find a Thai girl, maybe an American like you. Are you scared of me?’

‘Shivering.’ Allison smirks. His gun shakes again, this time with rage. ‘Which friend?’

Karl hisses. ‘I’m going to fuck you up.’

‘You haven’t got the guts to do anything to me.’

Predictably he gets angry. Unpredictably he drops the gun and lunges for her. Allison catches his arms and uses the momentum to pivot and throw him against the door of his apartment. It bangs open. Karl trips and falls. Allison enters and closes the door behind her. ‘Where is she?’

Karl’s whole demeanor changes the second he realises they’re alone. He comes off the ground like he knows what to do with himself. ‘Fuck you whore.’

Allison pulls out her baton and twirls it once. It’s a shit weapon when backed into a corner but it looks really good when you know what you’re doing. Karl looks at the tip of her baton and not her wrist. He’s not good with weapons. His hands clench and he moves his leg to get himself into a good position to lunge for her again. It must be Judo then, something with grappling. Not her strongest suit but not her weakest either.

Karl make’s his move, striking fast like a cobra for her middle. He’s almost preternaturally fast. This is how he caught the selkies. There’s no way the fae would be expecting a human to move like this. Allison drops her weight the second before he gets a hold, she drops the baton but manages to slip and twist just enough in the hold to jab her elbow into his solar plexus. He drops her immediately and she gets a jab in at his throat, twists her body to grab her baton and brings it up for a head strike. Karl twists the wrong way and manages to knock her into the nearby table. In the second it takes for Allison to re-orientate he grabs her and throws her clean across the room, crashing to the floor on her stomach. She plays dead a bit, just enough to let him relax and give her a chance to scan the room for weapons. Karl stands up and pulls himself up straighter. She’s close to a side table stacked with magazines, a lamp and a coffee cup. Not a lot of options unless she plans to beat him to death with GQ.

Allison stays low to the ground and makes a show of trying to get up.

‘I’m stronger than you.’ Karl breathes heavier, excited by hurting her. He stumbles forward too lost in his burgeoning lust to see that Allison isn’t down, isn’t out. ‘You have to do what I say.’

She turns on her side and grabs the edge of a magazine and throws it at him. His hand snaps out and catches it, he looks confused down at the magazine for just a second. She springs into action, crosses the space between them twice as fast as he could have done it and smashes her foot into his chest. He goes backwards but stays upright so she kicks him again. Punch to the face. Pivot away from his wild grab. Get behind him. Pick up the baton and ram him in the knees. He fall’s. Take an extra second to get her knife and slice across his back. Karl screams.

Allison gets her knee on his back and leans her full weight down. Karl struggles just enough to let her get a good hold on his hair and stick her knife on his throat. She makes three precise jabs to the nerve points in his shoulders and lower back.   

‘You’ve got one right now.’ She says softly, ‘where is she?’

‘Fuck you.’

Allison slams his head into the ground. His nose breaks. Karl has the fore thinking to stay still. She wrenches his head back again and reaches into her thigh holster for a vial.   

‘Do you know what this is?’ She holds the vial, filled with pinkish liquid, so he can see it. ‘Of course not, you’re an idiot, this is Witches Brew No.8.’

‘The police-’

One handed she opens the vial and pours it over his head. It burns the second it makes contact with his skin. Karl screams. ‘Did you think they didn’t have any friends? That no one would be there for them? That you could just hunt them and kill them and it would mean nothing?’

‘They’re monsters.’ He spits. ‘I’m going to hurt you, bitch. I’m going to fuck you-’

Allison smashes his head down again. ‘I hope there’s a bright hell for you, Karl.’

And then she makes him drink the rest of the brew.

It takes him eighty boring seconds to die, wailing the whole time. Allison rethinks her shopping list three times.

She’s fine with leaving the body here. There’s no one to call for clean up anyway which will be the first thing she remedies when she gets home. After that she needs to get a police officer, more guns and a tech expert. At least three safe houses. That’s a thought for soaking in the bath.

Smart human smugglers and kidnappers bring people in as families or all female groups. If she was a human shaped void of empathy, how would she get them here and where would she put them?

A woman comes out of her apartment as Allison leaves. She’s in her 30’s pinched faced and disapproving. Allison’s seen her before but she’s having trouble placing it.  

‘Is Karl okay?’

‘He’s fine, got a little rough.’ The voice slides into place. She’s one of the people she scouted at the BDSM meet up three weeks ago; hard core sadist, juggling two submissives. She wasn’t the most interesting one there, Allison only noticed because of how deeply secretive the woman had been. Fair enough considering how easily her house of cards could blow down.

‘You’re one of those girls.’ She says disapprovingly. ‘I never liked that he did that.’

‘No, actually.’ Allison smiles brightly. ‘I am looking for one of them though. Private investigator. Do you know where he purchased his...services from?’

‘It all started with that blue haired freak upstairs. Karl was normal enough until they started hanging out together. Then it became drugs and women...’ She clicks her tongue with distaste.

‘Which apartment?’

Karl’s neighbour frowns and positions herself aggressively. ‘You won’t go to the police?’

‘Why would I?’ Allison smiles just a little wider, ‘We’ve all got secrets.’

‘I don’t want anyone investigating me.’

Not because she has any great secrets. She just wants to avoid telling the truth. Allison finds this strangely amusing. She nods and the neighbour tells her.

‘But I want you to leave me out of it.’ She stresses.

Allison nods understandingly, ‘of course.’

The neighbour goes back inside and locks the door. Allison shakes her head and laughs quietly to herself.

\--

Preparation being key in all things, she goes home and sleeps, does some recon, showers, reloads her thigh holster with vials and a fresh knife, before she goes back to the apartment block. Climbing the stairwell up to her targets floor she idly considers her plans. Step One) locate skin market. Step Two) figure out shipping patterns and see if there’s a legal way to circumvent it without causing loss of life -unlikely but always worth checking, Step Three) kill everyone who needs to die, Step Four) clean up and hold Budapest.

There are, of course, other considerations. Where are the bodies going to go? How is she going to kill everyone with few weapons and no money? How does she go about it without the power structure that so utterly annihilated her? How the fuck is she going to find enough mercenaries trained in the supernatural? Will she have to do it herself?

She shakes it off a few metres from the door to Blue Haired Freaks door. There are scratches around the lock from when his key misses the lock. Sloppy too. Slow. The carpet is worn away in places by constant to-ing and fro-ing. He must leave a lot, or drag heavy things around. There’s a splotch on the wall, newly made. When she sniffs it she smells cardamon and bull testicles. Witches Brew 13, made for luck. Slovenly, probably absent minded, busy but not busy enough to develop the small habits that make it a functional lifestyle. So whatever he does is lower level, something that requires a lot of moving but not a talent for detail. Karl would have been the alpha of their relationship even if this guy knew more.

Allison takes a deep breath and throws herself at the door and bangs on it with both arms, thumping it with enough force her hair flies into her face. ‘Kaaaaaaaaarl! Karly! It’s meeeeee, baby. Karly!’

She keeps going for awhile with the thumping. Finally she hears a sound from inside and the door opens. Blue Haired Freak is about 5’10, nothing worth remembering around the face, but has beautiful green eyes that fade to grey. He’s a little chubby, but not overall unpleasant. She smiles a little, almost like a taunt, something she’s seen Lydia do with ease. Allison makes a pretty picture, she knows she does, tight shirt, breathy and blushing, hair a little mussed. Blue Haired Freak looks it over appreciatively.  

‘Hey.’ Allison smiles winsomely. ‘I’m a friend of Karl’s.’

Those pretty green-grey eyes narrow. ‘He doesn’t have any of those.’

Allison shrugs and tosses her hair back. ‘What’s your name?’

‘John.’ He says far too easily.

Liar.

Allison smiles a little more shyly. ‘He said you had something for me?’

John lights up. From the tip of his nose to the sudden harshness of breath his body telegraphs: sadistic and excited about it. Allison doesn’t sigh or shiver, she just lowers her eyes and tilts her head a little. Much like Karl, John is pretending at predation. She smells like blood and violence. No real animal would believe the subterfuge.

‘Come in.’

She follows him in. Immediately she can smell burning tallow, crushed nuts and hyacinth. She can’t smell it but there’s sure to be flesh and marrow around here too. Witch.

‘You make drugs?’  

‘Medicinal.’

‘Like for Grandma’s?’

John laughs, it’s a nice laugh. Shame that.

‘Something like that,’ John takes her hand and leads her past his crowded living room towards the back of the apartment. He has boxes and boxes of things all around. Some look like dvd’s, like small contraband and more mid-range stuff like imported animal parts. Allison smiles at him when he turns to look at her thoughtfully.

‘How much do you know?’

‘Enough to know Budapest doesn’t have a House anymore. That’s why you can do this, right?’ John will think she means the drugs.  

John snorts. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish. The amount of oversight was ridiculous.’

‘Hmm.’ Allison drags her feet a little, with coyness, with apprehension. John’s grip turns strong and painful, now he’s dragging her forward. He opens a door and hustles her through into a medium sized room. The walls are stained with smoke and grime. Tables sit at odd heights along the walls covered with plants and little bits of dead things. Decomposing guts here, mold covered pots there. Ick. On the walls are fur skins covered in nordic runes. One of them looks very familiar. Centre stage sits his boiling bot and a box of pale, pale green vials. The pot is steaming a blue so pure the artist in her aches to see it. John packs up the green vials, pausing to spit into the brew. He wraps them up carefully and then places them gently into her hands.

‘You’ll take these to Gorgon. You can have one.’ John looks at her consideringly. ‘Or you can wait awhile and I’ll give you something better.’  

Allison smiles at him. And then she headbutts him.

‘What the-’ John reels back and then forward, Allison steps around him in the small space. As she moves behind him she knocks his feet out and sends him careening straight onto one of the small tables. She sweeps a bunch of ingredients into the big boiling pot turning it from a gentle baby blue to a deep angry purple. She drops a knife into her hand, one of her big scary ones, and waits for him to look at her.   

John sits up, rubbing his head. ‘What the fuck.’

‘You’re not that good at magic. If you were you’d have noticed that I’ve still got blood under my nails. You’d have felt Karl die. You’d never have let me this close to your brew. Where’s the girl.’

‘I don’t know.’ John holds his hands up. ‘You have to let me fix the brew.’

‘I don’t, actually. You have one of their skin’s on your wall. Singed and stained. You should really have some more respect.’

John licks his lips and looks at the floor. ‘He has a storage unit. She’s in there.’

‘Okay, cool.’ Allison smiles like she did when he first saw her, he relaxes. ‘So what do I do with you?’

John looks at her. At the knife. At her. He weighs his chances and decides to try being really stupid. He gathers himself and makes a face like he’s charging into battle. Allison kicks out, fast as lighting, catching him in the face. Blood spurts out.

‘You’re a fucking child, Jesus!’ He says through his broken nose. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

‘You’re the one who just tried to fuck me. Where?

‘What?’

‘Where is the storage unit?’

‘I don’t have to tell you shit.’

‘I’ve killed nine people. I’m fine with hitting double digits.’

John blanches. ‘It’s-’

She holds out her hand and he stops immediately. His fear is a tattoo on his skin. She’s still mostly indifferent to that. She writes it down as an internal memo to worry about later. Keeping that scary knife in plain view and never giving him a clean shot at anything vital she throws a pencil and pad from by the pot down on to the floor. ‘Write it down.’

John snarls at her as he does. He throws the pad at her when he’s done. Weirdly, she likes him better for it.

‘What now?’ John says warily.

‘You could have lied to me.’ She says neutrally. ‘So I’m not going to kill you.’

John looks at her. ‘So?’

She pulls a vial from her holster and throws it to him. ‘You’ll drink this.’

John does. Really, really not a witch. His body tenses up and he begins to seize. Witches Brew 26. Paralysis. When it’s over and he’s lying in agony on the floor Allison sheaths her knife and checks his pulse. Steady. It’ll keep him here for 26 hours. Long enough to figure out if they need to talk again.

‘Oh, and Paul?’ Allison gives him one last smile, this one real and hers. ‘I know everything about you.’

\--

She dreams again, and it’s one of the bad ones, where she is torturer and slayer and Hunter. This time she awakens to the quake in her legs, the tremble of lust in her fingers, and thinks- _today I am going to save a life. Today I am going to do something I wouldn’t have hesitated to do before. Today I will be better._

\--

Paul doesn’t lie.

At 3am she drives into the garage of the house Karl’s mother used to own. The big blue shipping crate is sitting right there. Her palms start to itch. _What’s in the box, what’s in the box?_

The metal is scratchy when she prys it open. With her hearing so jacked up on adrenaline she can hear the selkes terrified inhale. Allison looks inside and waits for eyes to adjust.

The woman inside is little and brown. Her hair is damp and her skin is pricked with goosebumps. She looks at Allison with disbelief and something she believes falls perilously close to anger. Allison crouches down and holds out her hands. She pulls the other pelts from her bag and pulls out the only living one.

‘I’m going to keep you safe,’ She says. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t be scared.’

The selkie sniffs delicately, unlikely to let anything so small as imprisonment, torture and rape, keep her from showing the proper disdain for a non-threatening mortal. ‘Human.’

‘Hunter, actually.’

The selkie moves away from her.

‘I don’t think I’ll hurt you.’

‘Don’t think?’

‘He killed them. Hurt them. He enjoyed it.’ She holds her pelt out stiffly. ‘I stole this for you.’

‘You have my gratitude.’ The selkie says slowly.

‘My name is Allison Argent.’ Allison looks her in the eyes, firm and utterly sure. ‘And if you would like your gratitude to come without any further obligation will you do something for me?’

‘What?’

‘Tell them,’ Allison smiles, a little quirk of her mouth. She knows it makes her look younger, ‘that I’m not scared and I am not running.’

‘I will.’  

She watches the selkie leave, thoughts whirling in and out as fast as she can form them.

There are things she’s put out of mind. Kate. Her mother. The times when she was happier.

Her head is dizzy. She can taste blood. Red and salt and copper. It reminds her of being that scared teenage girl reaching out to Kate, asking to never be scared again. She’s run so far away from that now and she’s still just as scared. Fear doesn’t matter. The things that need to be done still need doing.   

Everyone better get ready to roll.

\--

Resistance happens all the time.

Resistance to opposition. To capture. To love, equality and hate. Resisting is not the act that builds reputations. Succeeding does. That and enough guts to step forward and do more.  

So Allison takes Budapest, she puts the sign back on her House there. Defends it. Keeps it. Then she finds and executes the Hunter family selling people on the black market. That’s her success. Slowly they come to her. They offer her alliances and she takes their loyalty instead. Soon she’s an empire of soft negotiation and hard retaliation. Soon the Argent name begins to mean something different.

She just has to make sure they don’t forget it.

\--

First things first: books and movies are a pack of lies. If you want to be successful at something as unreliable and volatile as starting a revolution you have to learn to tell the difference between risks and overreaching. Risk’s, if properly weighed and successful, lead to a better reputation and access to avenues beyond what you could have imagined before. An overreach always, always ends in defeat. The difference between a risk and an overreach is, generally, arrogance. If you believe there’s no way you can fail, if you think that there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you, if you believe that you’re on a righteous path that bows to no one and nothing, than your arrogance will be what causes your downfall.

If you try to do something that is legitimately beyond your reach you display your weak spots.   

Like Allison’s third favourite team leader selling her out to the DiGiulio family in Castelsardo.

She could have prevented this if only she’d been a little faster to catch the growing xenophobia in the part of her network situated in south Europe. If she hadn’t just assumed he followed her from the same affection she has for him. Now she’s going to have to kill him.

She lands in Castelsardo a few hours after sunrise, when the Mediterranean sea is an almost awful shade of blue against the rocks. She has her own private villa surrounded on all sides by natives and tourists, and therefore, an incredible sense of mundane privacy.

There have been murmurings of new rituals, new factions, new gods springing up. Hunter family’s are moving from the almost Luddite-esque hatred of magic and weapons invented after the Middle Ages and are embracing the necessity of alliances with those they would have once killed. There’s a new way rising and Allison is cresting the wave of it. Unfortunately so are the DiGIulio's -a ruthless, xenophobic family that has single handedly burned more witches in Italy than any other family. The rumor -which Allison has reason to believe is accurate- is that they’ve never stopped burning them. The DiGIulio’s have recently come into contact with an extremist cell of ex-government agents from South America who are hell bent on ridding the world of witch blood. The South Americans don’t have the reach but they do have the means. The DiGiulio's have the reach and not the means. What neither had before her man, Sard, passed it over a few weeks ago was the most recent co-ordinates for the most powerful witches on the planet.

Across the pond things are dangerous. Across the sea things are stirring and waking. The old ways of Europe are still alive, the Old Gods have their people and their positions. Their actions, while not predictable, can be intuited.This may have been the birthplace of Aleister Crowley but the Disillusionment has never gotten quite as firm a grip as it did in the colonies. In the new world the reformation of magic means that terrible, new things are possible. And those terrible new things are opening their eyes and looking towards the oncoming war with greedy eyes.

It’s one of Allison’s hardest jobs keeping the New World at bay.

With that unhappy thought, she puts on her bathing suit and goes hunting.

Hunters are required to be nomadic. You have a family compound where you train your children and the orphans of the families you’re aligned with, keep your bestiaries and your less...portable methods of murder. This is static and safe under any and all conventions, orders and acts designed to make the eternal conflict of the supernatural orderly. Active Hunters, adults and those in training, are exempt from most treaties and therefore have to be ready to leave at a moments notice. That’s one of reasons to take up specialisations that allow you to come and go with a fair amount of ease. Also putting down roots makes you a target especially when your business is death. Not to mention that it requires you to have a relationship with the locals and local law enforcement.

The DiGiulio family have bought two restaurants, a nightclub, a mechanic, and most importantly, a hotel. They’ve called it The Grand. It’s five floors, three swimming pools and four four star chefs of Hunter Code violations. The entire family, some 23 strong, all work for the DeGiulio empire.

It’s barely early afternoon when Allison checks into a room under her real name with her real eye colour and hair colour on display, takes long enough to set up her own bugging equipment before the bellboy that followed her upstairs puts his own in and reapplies her waterproof lip balm.  She passes the bellboy on her way down to the pool and gives him a quick slap on the butt, somewhat for the shocked face he makes and mostly to place the GPS tracker.

They have a huge pool just outside reception designed so you can see the splendour of people sitting around and eating expensive food from every point in the foyer. The position she takes up at the pool allows her to watch the family and their slow descent into paranoia. At the end of her first lap the bellboy runs -actually runs!- towards she assumes is the bosses office. At the end of her fourth lap, six people, all related enter the foyer and head straight up towards her room. She switches to backstroke and gazes up at the blue sky listening for the hisses of voices. When she switches to her final lap she see’s a man and a woman standing at the bar. They’re dressed from head to toe in black. That would be who she’s here to talk with. She ducks under the water for a moment to gather her thoughts.

Under the water she see’s scars lining the thin skin of her hands. Knobs of scarred tissue from weapons and where she’s broken and re-broken them dozens of times. You can tell a man by his hands. Allison’s are a resume.

Those who know what to look for will see that she works with knives, her calluses suggest a fondness for her bow and blunt objects, the thick ridge of poorly healed scar means her job relies on her skill and not her vanity, The way her nail’s grow suggest that she’s had them pulled off. She has survived. She is not easily swayed.

_What would you do?_

The same bellboy from before gives her his hand as she comes out of the pool. She accepts it and the soft towel he hands her gracefully. Mr Raphael DiGuilio is a very well kept 65, he’s trim in the middle and his hair is beautifully think. Next to him is his wife and his niece, both tall and light haired with deep set, mean eyes. They’re ageless in that way only the terrifying can manage.  

‘Ms Allison.’ He says with a little flourish.

‘Mr DiGiulio, how are you?’

‘Well,’ he meets and holds her eyes ‘as my children are well, and my wife is well, and all my cousins are also well.’

‘You are very young.’ His wife says, ‘we thought that the Argent traitor would be...’

The niece leans in. ‘Less wet behind the ears.’

Allison smiles meekly. _I am not a stupid little girl._

Mr DiGiulio looks her over slowly, lingering inappropriately. Allison understands that she’s meant to feel self conscious and makes the effort to appear like she doesn’t understand. ‘So you’ve come to put a stop to our little plan.’

‘Did you think no one would-’

‘Care?’ He throws his hands up in the air.  ‘No. No one but Ms Allison and the filth she fights for.’

‘It’s not for them. It’s for everyone who can’t protect themselves.’

‘The weak and unholy perish.’

‘They die because we kill them.’ Allison says softly. ‘That’s righteous sometimes, but not when it’s a way of life. Not when you have children tortured. Not when you make them torturers. Do you have any idea at all what’s it like to know that things could have been different? That I could have never known what it feels like to kill someone no matter how justified? I was broken down completely by what people like you did. How do your own children feel-’

He slaps her. Hard. Some unholy thing stirs in her chest screaming _bite back, hit back._

‘I was not weak.’ He snarls.  

Allison feels her lips pull back. ‘No? You think this makes you strong. You think this makes you right. Fine. I’ll tear you down and make you know what it’s like to be weak.’

He spits on her. ‘You are nothing.’

He takes his women and leaves her alone by the pool. She walks over to where the spare towels are kept and pulls one out for her hair as well. They didn’t kick her out, so there’s no reason to not enjoy their hospitality until she makes the next choice.  

‘You’re wrong.’ She says to herself. ‘You are so, so wrong.’

There are two paths here. One, she confronts them like any good hero would do. She fights them, takes them out -non-lethally of course- and she drags them to the Hunter Council and hopes they give a shit. They won’t, otherwise Allison would be surplus to requirements in the first place. Two, she uses what she was taught and she springs the carefully laid trap she set in motion long before she stepped into Castelsardo. This will work. She will make it work and the fallout will shake the last bit of doubt out of anyone else who’s watching.  

Which way to go now?

She follows the bellboy home.

\--

She’d be lying if she said she left it to chance.

The bellboy’s name is Raul Peters. His father is Samuel Peters, an english ex pat who collects model planes. His mother is Xiomara, the youngest granddaughter of the Gorlassar matriarch, sharing the name all of their women have since the Cold War. The Gorlassar are closest to the wicked witches of old tales even if they have made a recent effort to rehabilitate their image. This is the family from which the cruel tales of Morgan le Fay spring, as well as the Countess of Bathory.

This is the family the DiGiulio's where going to start with.

Little Raul was sent here to work for the DiGiulio's because he’s disposable. Allison follows him to the converted hostel where he lives with his father. She takes up residence in the apartment next to them and waits. A lot of her time, it seems, is spent waiting for people to come to her. At least this one comes with it’s own ETA.

She waits until just after 10, when all the streets fill with people going to dinner or out dancing, and in the commotion she lights the wards that will ensure no one knows what’s about to happen. There’s a light knock on the door just as she’s done arranging the tools on a low table.   

She opens the door and nods at the group of five outside. ‘Ben.’

Ben, who is much her right hand as her actual right hand is, smiles at her. ‘Allison.’

The people standing behind him are holding what looks like an oversized duffle bag between them. She steps back and allows them through. Once inside they unzip the bag to reveal the paralyzed form of Sard. She douses him with the antidote and has him tied to a chair.

Sard looks infuriated. ‘How dare you, you fucking _cunt_ -’

‘She holds the tip of her knife to his adams apple. ‘I don’t like betrayal. I don’t like that you’ve forced me to form a relationship with South America. I don’t like that your hatred of witches has endangered any number of people. I don’t like that I had to embarrass myself by coming out here personally to attend to you.’

‘I get what you’re trying to do. I really do. But they can’t be the sort of people you try to save. They’re witches. They’re evil.’

‘Is that how you think genocide works?’ Sard’s face ashens. Allison steps back and motions towards the door. ‘Send them in.’

Xiomara Golassar enters under her own power. She’s wizened and old, like the witch that gave Snow White the apple. This must be the oldest one. She looks at all of them, magic flowing in misty tendrils around her. When her eyes alight on Sard a look of hatred and lust comes into her eyes. Allison’s hand clenches once against her side, right where she usually keeps a knife.  

‘Allison.’ Xiomara says, her voice is beautiful and smoky. Allison thinks of sirens and ships pulled onto rocks.

‘Xiomara. He is yours. Between him and your grandson you should have more than enough information to take care of the DiGuilio family.’

Sard starts to shake. ‘Fuck no. Allison, I’m sorry.’

Allison ignores him.

‘This is a tremendous act of good will.’ Xiomara walks around to look at the pipes, pliers and assorted objects lying on the low table. ‘Shall we chalk it up to being a good samaritan?’

‘I want your support.’

‘Oh?’ Xiomara catches her eyes, she let’s the tidal wave of what she is come to the surface. More than the ocean. Crueler than the depths of the unknown.

Allison holds her eyes and feels nothing. Not fear. Nor admiration. She let’s her actions stand as judgement. ‘You will lend me 12 of your own kin, or ones you source from outside. They will have won no less than fifty challenges.’

Xiomara raises her hand, the sound of water rushing up in Allison’s ears.

‘Don’t.’ Allison says softly.

Xiomara doesn’t lower her hand but the water slows down to a trickle.

‘We hunt your families. We kill your children.’ Allison drops her eyes. ‘You have no reason to trust me.’

Xiomara opens her mouth. Allison holds up a hand to silence her.

‘If you give me a chance. If you work with me, and do as I say, then I will rip them down and I will make sure that they can never do it again.’

‘And you’ll be kinder.’

‘No,’ she shakes her head, ‘but I’ll be fairer.’

‘We’ve had similar offers from others.’

‘From Scott McCall? We know each other and Scott McCall isn’t a killer. I am. Beyond that, the rest don’t matter. They don’t have the Argent name.’

‘There’s another Argent.’

 _There were many, once_. ‘Not for long.’

‘Ýou will give them to us, and we will do as we please.’

It’s not a quite a question, but she understands anyway. Is she prepared to step aside knowing what happens next. These are not benevolent monsters. They won’t stop for begging, they won’t pause for mercy. What the DiGuilio family wants to do is unspeakable and what the Gorlassar family will do will be just as bad or eclipse it all together.

Allison swallows her lack or reservations and nods.

Xiomara taps a thoughtful finger to her nose. ‘If you don’t follow through we will kill you.’

Allison sticks out her pinky finger and forces down a laugh at Xiomara’s confused face. ‘A lack of commitment is not my problem.’  

\--

All 23 of the DiGuilio die. The oldest Xiomara sends her the pinky finger of each of them as a promise.

\--

She dreams of what it would have been had she stayed home, had she been what they wanted. In her hardest dreams she does what Gerard would -she finds immortality and takes it. Burning and salting and burning behind her. She’s Kate, a better Kate.

In her softest, most disparate ones she’s the long haired soft fingered wife of a man Scott McCall will never be. She has children and they have names but those fall apart at the first hurdle because whoever that woman is she’s not anyone with the Argent last name. The median falls somewhere between reality and ridicule. Lydia’s there sometimes, she thinks of Stiles as friend first, Isaac and Derek and all the rest are floating figures with no importance. Her parents flip from angels to monsters but all the time she knows she loves them and that they aren’t really there. Sometimes she loves where she should hate. Sometimes those old, old lessons float back to her from training - _This is what you are. This is what you do_ \- and she drowns it out with her own perseverance. _This is not what she will do. This is not what you will make yourself. This is what must not happen._

Most nights she has to fight to convince herself its worth it. That’s the part she finds most hellish.

\--

The day Allison meets Louisa Martell again is damp and muddy.

Everyone told Allison to stay away. That the Adisa proteges are just as deadly and dangerous as the woman whose lineage they follow. Witches won’t be bought and they won’t choose a side until they know who wins or who offers the most blood. Allison’s not here for an alliance. She’s here for a friend.

She stops a few metres from Louisa, hands in her pockets, projecting serene confidence and composure. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Adding another one.’ Louisa holds her ring finger to her forehead, a bubble of blood moving underneath the skin. The rush of magic crawls across Allison’s skin. Louisa crooks her finger, the drop of blood solidifying into a hard lump.

‘Who did you kill?’

‘Someone who needed it.’ Louisa smiles bloody teethed. ‘Mama Ekundayo says we’re not playing with you.’

‘I’m not expecting support from the witches.’ Allison tilts her head. ‘You moved in with Lydia.’

‘So what if I did?’

‘Good.’

‘Good,’ Louisa snorts. ‘What do you want Argent?’

What does she want? Allison watches as the short tight dress Louisa’s wearing catches fire. Louisa doesn’t move. Doesn’t show any fear. Maybe that’s why. ‘She doesn’t understand.’

‘Not even a little bit.’ Louisa agrees.

Allison smiles. Usually she has to work more for it. ‘We should be friends.’

Louisa smirks. ‘Because we understand each other.’

‘You don’t even notice it, how much more you are than other people, how much more you have to do and think about. You spend all your time working not to be taken in by it, by your own strength, by the powers around you. All those things trying to get you where they want you, how they want you. It can be a hell of a thing.’ Allison pauses. ‘Being consumed by something bigger than yourself.’

Allison holds Louisa’s gaze. Witches aren’t quite Allison’s forte. She’s heard of soul catching, when a witch laces you with their magic and looks inside you, but the actual experience is...terrifying. Louisa stares at her for a whole two minutes before she looks away and frowns. ‘Alright. We’ll be friends.’

Allison puts on her cute smile, the one that makes her look about five years younger. ‘Do friends get to know where the rest of the pedophile ring live?

Louisa smiles back. Her teeth are pointed, her saliva is a touch pinker than it should be. ‘Friends get to bury the bones.’

Allison looks at the mess, then inclines her head slightly in agreement.

All that magic, all that passion and rage, blinks at Allison from behind the dark of Louisa’s eyes. ‘Don’t you want some help?’

‘Go find Lydia.’

‘Oh?’ Louisa sinks a lot of warning into the word.

‘It’s not an order.’ Allison holds her hands up. ‘I’m not suicidal.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘She doesn’t understand.’ Allison looks away. ‘And I can’t look back.’

Louisa doesn’t look convinced.

Allison sighs. ‘I am trying to be the sort of woman who pays back her debts.’

Louisa thinks it over, never letting her eyes slip from Allison’s face. Not even blinking. Finally she nods in understanding. ‘I’m not your girl, Argent. I can try to be hers.’

Then Louisa walks away; shoes sloshing through flesh and blood spilling in her wake.

\--

The witches send an emissary, the druids send an emissary, Japan sends an ambassador, Ecuador sends it’s Vice President, and Europe trembles and sways at Allison Argent’s call. They know who she is. They know what she’s about.  

It’s going well, it’s going amazing. She’s nowhere near the end but if things keep going she might get to the middle.

So of course, this is when Gerard makes his move. A video of the execution of the DeGuilio family ends up on YouTube. Most think it’s a joke or viral marketing for a horror movie. Most does not include the supernatural community, the Hunter’s or the UN.

He sends her a personal copy with a still of her staring right into Xiomara’s eyes and You have been compromised written in jaunty cursive on the back . In another moment she will find the one who betrayed her.

She knew what happened in Castelsardo would come back to bite her in the ass. She knows the other Hunters see her as more mammal than human, more like what they kill than those they protect, and she’s been willing to wear that. She’s a thing alone. A Hunter fighting against Hunter’s. She’s been so careful to only let a certain image of her get out. Allison the Leader. Allison the Benevolent. Allison the Uncompromising. Allison the Fair. She keeps the other one inside; the torturer, the killer, the one who still looks at those she’s fighting for and feels indifference for. Everytime she looks at her own advisors, her own mercenaries, and finds it easy to reduce them to their usefulness, to cannon fodder. She keeps that inside her.

She didn’t make the Gorlassar do that, she didn’t uncork the madness of magic and spill it all over the mostly innocent. Watching it now, looking at the clueless comments on Reddit and the condemnation across Tumblr and the news, she see’s what someone else might. Monsters condoning monsters.

\--

To be honest the six weeks after Gerard puts Castelsardo on the web are a painful blur. She get’s reamed out in seven different languages, loses her suppliers for three weeks, has the actual shit punched out of her, loses her Witches Brew supplier and has to make do with stock so weak it takes her six hours to heal.

Everyone takes her to task about every meaningless detail of every report. She responds with calmness, with poise and elegance. Doesn’t change a damn thing. It wears thin after awhile, she can feel them pushing and pushing for her to break. She doesn’t. She won’t give them the satisfaction.

And then she loses her shit at a meeting.

‘No,’ she hisses at the kitsune trying to con her into apologising to a minor family in the Carpathian mountains, ‘no, I will not make reparations to the Dorin family because I have not offended them. Please, if you’re all going to scalp me at least wait until after the New Year.’

‘We’ll turn to someone else-’

‘Who? Who do you have that will do what I do? Who will care for you and only kill you when necessary? Who will sit her week after week and listen to you squabble? Who do you have that is better than me?’ She leans down and gets right in his face, his eyes flash in alarm. She drops her voice. ‘My grandfather? The witches? Other Hunters?’ She turns to the room at large. ‘If not me, then who!’

So that goes well.

Home again, two days after she blows up, and there are signs of forced entry. Allison has a pretty solid bet on who it is, so much so she brought him coffee.

She steps over the violently broken lock and bumps open her door. She pauses to take a photo of it, it’s so beautifully staged. He probably picked it first and did this for kicks. She puts down the coffee’s on her kitchen bench. He’s somewhere further into the apartment, probably sitting in the hallway that her bedroom branches off of. She pours a little extra milk into her latte, they always skimp on it, and walks herself and the two coffees to meet an old love.

‘I got you four shot espresso with mint syrup. It’s really strong so be careful.’

One red eye opens and closes with acknowledgment. He’s leaning against her bedroom door. Allison places the coffee at his feet and stands back to observe. He’s big. Bigger than she remembers him. The sort of muscle you get from working outside lifting and carrying. He has tattoo’s wriggling their way across his skin, not fully covered yet but getting to point where it becomes a statement all on it’s own. His hair is short. There’s a twisting in her stomach like she’s lost something valuable. She pushes it away, that’s not the jittery feeling she wants to have around Scott McCall.

‘What are your intentions?’ He asks. His voice is different too, deeper and more resonant.

Allison sits cross legged on the floor. ‘Towards you?’

‘I saw the video feed.’

She uncaps her coffee and blows on it. ‘He sent it to you.’

‘It’s on YouTube.’

‘How the hell did they let that happen?’

‘BayLaurel has decided it’s in our best interests to have leverage on you. We leaked it.’

It’s a testament to how tired she is that doesn’t even sting.

‘Allison-’

She shakes her head to dislodge her thoughts. ‘Incase you have to kill me publically. I understand.’

Scott looks at her intensely. ‘No you don’t. I didn’t pick this, neither did Stiles. We serve other parties.’

‘Who want to know what I’m up to.’

‘Who need to know. Like I need to know if there’s a chance here.’

‘So you came with a warning and an offer.’

‘I can’t keep ignoring you.’ Scott leans back and closes his eyes. ‘I’ve given you as much space as possible. Sending Stiles to Europe instead of someone who doesn’t know you, not openly positioning myself against you and taking the inevitable popularity hit when everyone realised I had no real plans to cross the pond.’  

‘Scott.’ She says exasperated. ‘Just be honest with me.’

‘We need an alliance so we can work together and end this before it gets any bigger.’ He pauses. ‘You go around setting things on fire and blackmailing people. Those people turn up on my doorstep and ask me whether or not I asked you to raze Europe so I could sweep through and take it over. I’m a reactive force. I just make places safe for other people to settle. ’ Scott stops and opens bright red eyes.

Allison raises an eyebrow and motions for him to continue.

He snorts. ‘Clearly I am not aspiring to that. So here’s what we’re going to do: you are going to come with me on a series of treaty negotiations. All the ones I’ve chosen are high profile and beneficial to both of us. The first is in about five days, close to New Years. We appear together and we don’t answer any questions. Let everyone make assumptions. I don’t need to feed the speculation.’

‘I or we?’

‘BayLaurel.’ Scott rubs his nose. ‘Derek’s idea. He’ll be here too in a couple of days. Hale family still means something to some people.’  

‘He’ll stay here.’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘He can’t stay anywhere else Scott. That defeats the whole point.’ Allison sighs and pulls her hair down from it’s bun. ‘You can’t step back from this.’

‘From what? The Houses are almost completely gone. We’re an open secret and the second that thin shield between us and everyone else shatters we’re all going to die.’ He says bluntly. ‘Who’ll be first? The small fry who can barely protect himself or me, the Big Bad True Alpha? What the hell was the point of all the misery with the Alpha Pack if I’m not even going to defend those who need it. I’d die for you, for my friends, but I can’t throw myself away for you. Too many people are counting on me.’

‘So?’

‘Work with me. We can do this.’

 _Things change and things stay the same._ She looks down at the swirling coffee. _Things move and then becomes still again._

Scott’s still waiting for her answer.

She looks away from him. ‘It’s nearly Christmas. Will you still be here?’

Scott pushes himself off the wall. She looks up at him as he pulls her up and into a hug. He smells like smoke and the woods back home. ‘Of course.’

Allison wraps her arms around him and holds on.

\--

Scott unfucks it all slowly and methodically. If she was less relieved Allison would be deeply jealous.

‘It’s the eyes,’ Scott says solemnly over dinner. It’s Christmas Eve and the streets are packed. ‘No one wants to disappoint them.’

Allison laughs and steals the rest of the food off his plate.

‘Allison,’ he says sadly, batting his eyes dramatically.

Allison stuffs her mouth completely full and moans while she eats. Scott tries fluttering his eyelashes again to no avail. She steals at least a few bites of his food at every course after that just so he does it again.

‘You are heartless.’ He says over dessert. She lets him have that one to himself.

Allison grins with her mouth full and swallows. She’s happy. The happiest she’s been in a while.

And yet...

There’s this thing between the two of them that’s nibbling away at her. It’s not who they are or what either of them are doing. They’re both capable of pulling off that cloak whenever they need to. She has the feeling it’s older than that, much older. Allison is made of many small heartbreaks -from never having a puppy, never having a home, the bone deep knowledge that the second she slit that first mans throat she was never getting the blood off the Argent name- but it feels like the whole thing just shudders with grief when she looks at the first person to love her completely and wholly for herself.

They walk home hand in hand. She doesn’t mind the hand holding, in fact it was always her favourite part of relationships, but the looks she gets from others make her the wrong kind of nervous. Scott must pick up on it because he drops her hand.

She makes egg-nog at home. Scott refuses due to a lifelong hatred for eggs.

‘What do you want for Christmas?’ Scott looks in her well stocked fridge appraisingly.

She drinks her mostly-nog-egg-nog and thinks I want a new bow, I want to re-dye my hair, I want to go somewhere without the weight of this unsaid between us

‘I’m not in love with you,’ she says. And I don’t trust you the way I did when I loved you.

Scott gets up and comes to her. He places two warm familiar hands on her and kisses her deeply and sweetly. He stops, leans back, and for the first time there is nothing. ‘I’m not in love with you either.’

Allison kisses him on the cheek and the nose and then hugs him with as much force as she can muster. Scott sighs into her hair.

‘Want some duck?’ Scott pulls her closer. ‘I make okay duck.’

‘Are you sure, duck can be tricky.’

‘I make _excellent_ duck.’

\--

The duck is awful.

\--

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a werewolf messiah with a large fortune, a shit ton of enemies and unsurpassed power is always in need of a good council of war. It is a truth less well acknowledged that any supernatural war council is made primarily of potential backstabbing and shotgun alliances with things that could kill you.

Today they’re on a wide snowy plain between the crossing of two tree’s next to a lake that’s so deep the water is midnight blue. Allison has her shemagh tied military style around her head, a gun with illegal bullets that she knows can get through anything short of magical reinforcement, five knives with blades made of different metals and magic kevlar under armour. Scott is wearing a long coat, a thin t-shirt, holey jeans and no shoes. They’re waiting patiently for a once in a dozen lifetime event.

‘Think he’s late?’ Scott asks.

Allison tugs on a glove. ‘I don’t think he can be late.’

Scott shrugs and begins whistling.

Looking around her Allison finds it hard to believe this place exists. It snows in Europe. There are tree’s. There are lakes. But the snow here is immovable no matter how she steps or kicks it, it somehow falls back into the exact position it was before. It never greys or melts. The twin tree’s at their backs are impossibly tall, five, six storeys high and twisted around themselves. The lake twinkles. Allison has the absurd notion it may actually be the night sky.

‘Irregular fields.’ Scott says between whistles. ‘Where different kinds of magic overlap and create a pocket of unsustainable magic that warps reality.’

Allison glares at him. ‘I know that.’   

Scott grins, ‘I’m sure. I just know I know more.’

‘Irregular fields are the perfect foundations for summonings since the confluence of polar forces, such as life and death, and the thinness of the barriers between planes, such as now and then, means that the very rules that govern magic are rendered obsolete. Where regular fields require a quid pro quo arrangement to function an irregular field can work without exacting a price from the summoner.’ Allison cocks her eyebrow. ‘I read that book too.’

Scott laughs and bumps shoulders. ‘You’re not best friends with a walking encyclopedia.’

‘That’s because Lydia is a whole damn library.’  

Scott’s face twitches a little. Allison’s never quite figured out what part of talking about Lydia makes him so tense. Surprisingly Scott doesn’t have a guilty conscience and it’s not like they were involved with each other.  

She blows on her hands and holds the warm air to her face. Her breath is pretty terrible. ‘I might freeze to death.’

Scott frowns. ‘If he doesn’t show up soon-’

And suddenly he’s right there.

Scott startles a little and covers it by dropping into a bow. Allison curtsies. The man is silver haired and androgynous looking. Just a hint here and there of womanhood around his hips, offset by the broadness of shoulders and the heaviness of his jaw. His hair is long and silver and the colour of starlight.

He’s also about nine feet tall.

He looks down his nose at them. ‘Let me have this conversation for you. There’s nothing you can offer me.’

‘Not even the chance to vanquish evil?’ Scott says.

The silver haired man raises an eyebrow. ‘Who is this evil? How do you know I did not have a hand in creating it?’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’ He says. ‘What do you know of what I would do?’

Allison brushes her fingers against his letting him know without talking that she’s ready to fight with him.

‘We could make you,’ she says softly.

Everything stops. Everything.

‘Could you?’ He says softly. ‘Could you really now?’

Something soft and wet and dark moves from out of the perfect lake, unbends from the trees, rises from the snow. It curls around her and Scott tasting them and whispering across their skin. It finds them wanting and brittle and fleshy. Easy to eat. Easy to bring into the consuming embrace of the night.

Allison doesn’t breathe in or out. She doesn’t move at all.

Scott’s fingers ghost over hers and she looks at him. He’s fine, breathing normally, but his eyes are glowing, swirling, with enough magic to make everything in her recoil. Underneath his feet little green sprouts grow and curl around his ankles.

He grasps her hand firmly and shocks her into breathing again.

‘If you’re going to do this, do it now.’ Scott says plainly. ‘I can’t guarantee something else won’t make an appearance.’

Allison moves a little, ready to move, ready to fight.

‘No, I think not.’ The silver haired man says. ‘I am not a fighter anymore.’

‘What are you?’

‘Somewhat more diplomatic.’ He rubs his big bearded chin, ‘why don’t we sit down and have a talk?’

Allison sighs with relief. ‘That sounds-’

It all moves sideways and down at once. One moment Allison is standing next to Scott in that field and the next she’s by herself in a snowy valley surrounded for miles on each side by endless white. And she is very, very cold.

He’s here with her, the silver haired man, and he’s holding an old toy sword.

_Things move in circles she hears even things that come to an end._

The silver haired man moves forward and Allison moves back. He steps forward. She steps back. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. Her foot goes straight through the snow. She tries to yank it up to no avail. The silver haired man comes to within a few metres of her.  

He unhinges his jaw. She hear’s Samson Lui’s voice. ‘ _What are you?_ ’

Fuck him.

‘I’m Allis-’

_What are you?_

‘Hunter.’

_What are you?_

‘Killer! Murderer! Assassin!’

She wrenches her foot out of the snow and moves forward. The first step or two is easy, but then he smiles, and suddenly there’s ten, twenty, thirty metres of snow between them. She steps forward and her foot falls into the snow again. Pulls it out. The next step goes through too. Her boots disappear so she goes forward barefoot.  

_What are you?_

She’s persistent, brave and she’s fighting the universe, so it’s one foot in front of the other, even as she feels her skin peel off in strips. The kevlar restricts on her chest. She’s got a whole damn world to save. She keeps walking. Pressure slides from the bottom upwards, rubbing her skin like sandpaper, it wraps around her neck and moves back and forth like it’s sawing through her neck. Hell, it might be. She keeps walking. Time slows down to the push of her lungs out and in, blood from where her lips are raw, from where her neck is being sliced off. Blood on the snow. She keeps walking. Left foot. Right foot. Left. Right. Left. Right. Blood on her face. Left. Right. Left. Right. Hair being pulled out by the roots. Left. Right. Pain, so much pain she can’t even remember to breathe. It’s instinct to let a knife fall to her hand ready to fight. Instinct poured into her by breaking in circumstances much like this. She broke before. She can’t think about anything else. _She broke, she broke, she broke_. Breathing gets harder. She drops her weapon and with that the last of her will.

‘Desperate!’ Allison falls to her knees at his feet. There’s a popping noise, like her ear drums being blown. The sucking feeling of his power, the all consuming pressure of his attention, runs up and down her body and buries itself in the fractures of her bones. She can’t breathe. ‘I’m desperate.’

He leans down and places a fatherly hand on her head. She turns her face so he doesn’t see her cry. ‘I will help you for that. I will aid you for that. But you must understand that I am not mortal. If you tried for a hundred years you could not vanquish me. I am beyond even your influence little Worldbreaker.’

His power leaves her breathless at his feet. She’s pissed herself. She’s crying. Every part of her is shaking and trembling with fear.

Who is she kidding? She can’t do this. She can barely protect herself against this how the hell is she going to save the whole fucking world?  

_What would you do to be strong enough to survive?_

She’d give up. She’d tremble before something bigger than herself. She’d rip and render and reform. She’d do all of that but right now she can’t even pick up the knife. Here she is after all this shit and blood and tears and it’s going to fall apart because she’s scared. The knife on the ground is silver edged, it won’t do a damn thing to him.

_What would you do?_

There’s a moment of hair and fur under her hands. Lydia crying because no one came to save her, the dead feeling of those Selkie pelts. Her own hair back before she cut it, back when she thought she had family, back when she was begging to be stronger, to be what she is now. It only takes the good doing nothing.

It might not do anything; she sure as hell will.

She picks up her knife and throws it. It thuds against the wooden sword so she twists her little silver knife to deflect. The sword turns real in his hands and he looks surprised. Allison pushes with what little will she has and forces the blades along one another. If he hadn’t been distracted she never would have been able to do it. Once his sword goes down she quickly flicks her wrist and sends her little silver blade into his neck. It dissolves and falls to dust. He doesn’t turn but everything blurs and burns around her. She’s pissed him off. Good.  

Allison grits her teeth. ‘You named me Worldbreaker. If you and yours made the world then you made me, too. You made centuries of genocide and blood. That might be chump change to you but it’s my life. It’s my world. You’ve named me now and you have a duty to stay and see what you’ve created.’

Allison passes out. The last thing she see’s is the corner of his mouth rise, just a little.

\--

‘What did you say?’ Scott murmurs as he drives them back.

Half of Allison’s ribs are broken, she has frostbite down her back, she’s blind in one eye. The potions are healing her incredibly slow.

She tries her hardest not to grin like a lunatic, ‘Nothing that didn’t need saying.’

‘Do I have to worry about you?’ Scott asks softly. Over the years Scott has developed the ability to layer that soft caring kindness that’s always been apart of him with a steel backbone that makes it as much a warning as a caress. Allison think’s it’s pretty hot in a detached ‘we may as well have never dated for all I’m attracted to you now’ kind of way.   

‘Nope.’ She fails her attempt to keep the smile off her face, ‘that was really something.’

‘Usually Stiles does these ones. I may have to rethink that.’

‘Yeah. I don’t think he has the temperament.’

Scott gives her an odd look. ‘No. I mean the bit where he ripped out all the magic.’

‘I’m not magic Scott.’

‘Oh. Yeah. What the hell did he do to you, then?’

‘Nothing that hasn’t happened before.’ Allison closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to deal with the way Scotts’ hands tighten. ‘He did call me something though.’

‘Oh?’

‘Worldbreaker. What did he call you?’

Scotts lips press together.

‘That bad.’

‘You have no fucking idea.’ Scott growls. ‘Do you need a hospital?’

Allison gives him her best blank stare. What’s a hospital?

Scott rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t complain to me then.’

Scott dives them home. Sitting at her breakfast bar are two large designer luggage bags and Derek Hale.

Derek hasn’t aged from when she saw him last. He’s scowling at the two of them and makes no offer to help when Scott hauls her through the door carefully taking her weight.

Allison narrows her eyes. ‘Hale.’

Derek grimaces. ‘Argent.’

No love lost there.

‘Right then.’ Scott mutters, ‘this will go fine.’

\--

It does for the most part.

Oh, the business doesn’t.The business is bloody and mean. Several prominent families have taken a stand against her, more have sided with her -and have been very clear it’s only because of the men they can see standing with her, still more are bleeding them dry of resources they don’t have. Scott is nothing like the boy he used to be most of the time. He’s not vicious, or unkind, but he approaches everything with an absolute implacability. It’s what he wants or it’s nothing. Derek isn’t much better but he has the benefit of not being anywhere near as scary.

For what it could be worth between two people sitting in as much familial blood as Derek and Allison, a peace forms. First, Derek makes good coffee and brings better bread. Allison is awake too early, talking in Urdu to someone she has only ever heard of before, she’s not hungry but she can’t afford to fade. Scott would take the phone from her. Derek leaves coffee by her, replacing the it when it cools and doing nothing else.

Allison repays him the same day with a vinyl record. Derek picks her up a new roll of her favourite brand of feminine products which wins points for the sheer hilarity of watching Scott twist himself into a pretzel about it. Allison brings home an extra pastry filled with some sort of spice and custard. After that Derek is Derek in her head first and Hale somewhere after ‘the asshole that drinks the end of her coffee’. They don’t quite manage to smile at each other, or say nice things, but building any sort of lightness between them makes things easier. It will last a week maybe, but in a way it’s made her feel closer to human than all her failed dates.

\--

Scott is about to leave for a meeting in Sweden with a series of contracts Derek’s all but killed himself revising. It’s past late afternoon, the in between time, and she lets the house fill with soft jazz. Derek is surrounded by contracts, heavy lidded from lack of sleep, he nods at her once before drifting off. She takes the final contract out of his white knuckled hands.

‘Stay safe.’ She says to Scott, pressing her lips gently to each cheek.

‘Don’t kill each other.’ He replies, a touch too seriously.

Allison rolls her eyes. ‘Whatever, worrywort.’

Scott frowns pointedly before disappearing in a literal plume of smoke. Allison coughs, faeries suck. She closes the door and leans back against, eyes closed, thinking through her internal list of things to do. She comes up with eat dinner, see how much of popular culture you no longer understand.

‘What do you want for dinner?’ Derek asks from where he’s seated on the couch. He must have run the same internal equation.  

‘Pizza place is closed.’

‘Thai?’

‘I don’t like the Thai around here. They use this weird fish sauce.’

Derek frowns. ‘I just spent four hours talking to the Italians. I don’t want to eat them too.’

‘Fish and chips? I’ll walk down and get it.’

Derek fishes out some money from his back pocket. ‘Some beer too.’

Allison narrows her eyes. ‘You’re not very polite.’

Still, she shrugs into a light jacket -magical kevlar padded, hiding several weapons- and takes Derek’s money. She puts it into a separate compartment in her wallet, perversely uninterested in seeing anything that reminds her of how closely her goals and BayLaurels are aligning. She buys him three beers -one good, one cheap, one hers and not his, and cheap greasy fish. When she gets back Derek’s pulled the TV out and moved the chairs around so they can eat together. Allison raises an eyebrow but offers no comment.

‘What’s on TV?’

‘Dunno, it’s all German.’

‘Hungarian.’

‘No.’ Derek says slowly, ‘listen and see.’

She does, and he’s right, so she steals her beer out of his hands. Derek growls -growls!- so Allison reaches over and takes a not insignificant portion of his chips as punishment. She tips her drink at him -to irritate him and to let him know that until she’s done eating all she want’s is the TV. Derek huffs and eats his own food. She mutters translations under her breath when the subtitles screw up, Derek does too, sometimes they have different ones. She relaxes, let’s her self unspool, not lowering her guard so much as leveling it out. The translation is way off this time, she grins and turns to tell him so-    

-And turns to see him staring at her.

 _Lust. Caution. Fear. Curiosity._ There’s a moment, the same as in Paris with Stiles, that she feels something bubble up and twin between them. Not violence, or monstrosity, or murder, but something with just as final an end.   

Allison mouths the edge of her beer. ‘You lost your mind?’

This is something bored twenty somethings do. They touch each other, and experiment, and take dumb risks because they’re too drunk or too silly. Allison rubs the tips of her fingers together and feels the dry, rough skin of her calluses. You get scars through recklessness, calluses through perseverance, and strength through caution. Never exceed your limits, always think it through, because you will pay for your mistakes. That’s half a life worth of lessons. She will always be older than she really is.

Maybe Derek is too old, too.

She uses packing up the food and refuses as an excuse to get some motion. She puts the leftover beer in the fridge and turns the soggy chips at the bottom into the trash. She comes around to the front of the counter and looks at the floor between him. Derek’s legs tense and release. Disinterest won’t stop her, not if that giddy feeling is the same thing it always is. Derek stands up moves in leaving just a bit of distance. She bites her lip to stop the grin.

She’s the brave one, she always will be. Sometimes thats more fear than blessing. Derek is still looking at her, losing his confidence. She kissed Scott first all that time ago, she had him first, she left him first. She always leaned in for what she wanted because thats the fastest way to make it happen.

‘I’m not my aunt.’ Because fair is fair is fair and he should look at her as she is, not as she might have been.

Derek does something odd with his face, like a half aborted smirk and apology. ‘Time’s not a particularly good healer but it does give you enough room to get your head put on straight. So, no, Argent, you aren’t Kate.’

Allison smiles and bites her lip. She’s old, she’s cautious, she’s not going to move first. She’s brave and she’s young and she always kisses first.

She moves forward and back from Derek’s mouth. ‘This is stupid.’

He smiles bright and reckless, hands delving downward to her belt loops. He pulls her around so that she’s pressing against the counter, his front pressed to her back. Hands pressed against the cool top. Slow rolls of his hips against her back, his fingers slipping between her legs, past the clothing and then his thumb rolling her clit in time. She shivers and leans into it, head falling back so her hair is brushing his shoulder. She pushes back hard, trusting him to understand the line between her strength and his. The hand not in her pants comes down on to the countertop as well for balance. With a harder thrust he pushes them down, her elbows come down on to the table and he uses the angle to pull her back firmer against him.

‘Shit,’ she says as she comes. Derek grunts.

Derek pulls his hand out from her pussy and gives it a congratulatory pat. ‘Don’t have condoms.’

‘Really stupid.’ she laughs. ‘I’m clean and on birth control.’

Derek grunts again, but the hand cups her thoughtfully. ‘If we do, than neither of us holds back, and neither of us regrets it.’

‘I don’t feel regret anymore.’

Derek sighs into her shoulder. ‘Alright then, Allison.’

‘You should take the lead Derek.’ She moves his hand to her stomach and leans back a little forcing him into movement. Derek grins against her shoulder and grips her about the hips. He moves gracefully back and forth then sideways and then he lifts her up till her feet just skim the ground and spins her in his arms. She laughs and swings her arms up around his neck to kiss him. They hold each other close still swaying until Derek lifts her leg up. The rest is easy laughing as he pulls her skirt too hard, the kiss of her teeth on his lips, his nose too when he does something exciting. He winds her long hair in one of his hands and uses it to steer her, she lets him, for the freedom of submission and the small smile he wears when she falls to her knees. Somewhere between the walls of the kitchen -his back flexing under her hands, her thighs moulded to him- and the first rays of sunlight that roll over them both of them change. Allison see’s the blue of his eyes and feels nothing but the warmth of him inside of her. She see’s Derek too, the way he looks at her scarred legs and the pink of her nipples like he would at anyones. Something in both of them, and perhaps in the world outside of them, leans a little and eases someplace new.  

‘No regrets?’ He asks against her collarbone.

‘No,’ Allison watches the long curve of his body and thinks _this was an end to something, something unfathomably large_. ‘I don’t think I ever could.’

\--

Scott and Derek leave under the cover of night and one of her best five man teams.

She returns to base weeks after that, recurring food poisoning keeping her away. There’s something new brewing in Czechoslovakia that needs all of her brightest minds. She wears a chic bright grey pantsuit into the busy bustle of the business heavy street her headquarters resides in. Slipping into the building amongst a group of similar styled people she coasts through to the special elevator thats for her use only. A broad shouldered, mixed race man races towards the elevator just as it begins to close, she stops it at the last second.

‘Much obliged,’ he says, tipping an imaginary hat. He has a deep, rich voice. He has a gun tucked into the back of his slacks.

Allison nods once but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge him.

‘Come here often?’

Allison looks at him from underneath her eyelashes. ‘Do you?’

The man looks at her oddly.

She raises a mocking eyebrow. ‘Give it up Ben, you’re still a terrible actor.’

Ben laughs. ‘It’s good thing you hire me to kill people, then.’

The elevator doors open and spit them put into a wide open room filled with ten people. Allison’s inner circle. They all sit down when she arrives, Ben quietly pulling out her seat.

Allison doesn’t take it, instead walking toward the very end of the room and the windows looking out into the street. Everyone groans. They have all done enough bodyguard detail to know where in the room the ‘body’ should not be. One day, she thinks, they’ll get that that’s why she does it.

Someone hands her tea and then they wait, in silence, to know why they’re all here.

‘We have an alliance with Scott McCall.’ She says.   

Noise.

Everyone’s on their phones calling, or texting, reorganising their people, putting everyone on standby. She suspects at least two of them are recalling a hit they put out on Stiles. She gives them five minutes to fret and work while she drinks her tea. Ben catches her eyes twice, she mockingly blows him a kiss.

When they all slow down she takes her seat. ‘We need to reorganise the chain of command. Now that Scott has agreed to be our ally the America’s will be far more of a problem. He’s agreed to let us have as many bases as we can reasonably hold so long as none are within a hundred miles of Beacon Hills.’

‘Beacon Capital.’ Juna, one of her financiers, says.

‘Beacon Capital.’ Allison nods. ‘We need to get that moving as fast as possible.’

‘It’s the centre of your grandfathers power.’ Someone says.

‘And it’s the centre of rebellion.’ Allison taps a finger against her cup, slowly. All of their eyes focus on it. ‘I want a fifth of everyone’s resources and personnel.’

A roar of commotion.

‘A fifth,’ Jasper, another financier, bangs his fist on the table. ‘That is too much!’

Allison places her cup on the table. ‘Who are you to me?’

‘I’m one of your financial backers.’

‘Mine?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you do what I say?’

‘When you’re reasonable.’

The cup slides back into her hands, the only sound in the room. She takes a sip. ‘Or?’

‘I’ll pull support.’

She stands again and turns her back to them. ‘Do.’

There’s arguing, and pleading, and yelling.

Then-

Jaspers voice is small. ‘We’ll do what you need.’

All but four people clear the room. Only when she see’s them safely away through the window does she sit down again. She opens her mouth to say something when there’s a huge lurching to the side, her dinner rising up to meet her again.

‘Ugh, sorry.’ She puts a hand to her stomach. ‘Food poisoning.’

Cara, her woman in Spain and current undefeated hand to hand world master, laughs at her. ‘Maybe you’re pregnant?’

Allison drops her cup.

‘It’s not quite that dire, love.’ Ben says soothingly, stepping around the shattered cup to pat her shoulders soothingly. ‘Now, do we need to have the birds and the bee’s talk?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘When a man and a woman get very drunk...’

‘I will have you killed.’

‘That’s quite impossible as I am your best assassin and I will see it coming.’

‘I am not-’ Wait, shit. Derek. Derek. ‘Someone go buy me a test.’

The whole room goes dead silent. Everyone turns to look at her.

‘Really?’ Ben looks shocked, which is rude because she does have sex. She just doesn’t sleep with anyone who she might have to one day have killed and that rules out a lot of people.

Except Derek whom she had sex with because she was bored.

Derek Hale

Oh god.

‘Buy me a test. Now.’ She sinks enough command into it that everyone hops up and leaves.

It’s Cara who comes back first, big brown eyes wide and solemn. Allison’s sitting on the toilet, head in her hands.

‘Do you need hand holding, lucero?’ She holds out the deceptive paper bag.

‘No.’

Cara hesitates. ‘Alright. I’ll keep the men out.’

She does the test, curled up on the counter, breathing slowly. When her time is up she hops down and sits, cross legged on the floor, facing the mirror. Her hands twitch, opening and closing without her explicit permission. She looks. Hisses out a breath that she refuses to let become a cry.  

Her hands shape her belly.

‘How do I not kill you?’ She says to the mirror.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes to cry and scream and rage. Then she gets up and deals with it like the adult she is.

Everyone is there. Allison clear her throat. Her throat is dry and cracked. ‘Where’s the safest place we have?’

‘Sydney, Australia.’ Ben says immediately. ‘Are you?’

‘In the family way?’ She doesn’t manage to keep the derision all the way out of her voice. ‘It doesn’t get past this room. If it does, you kill them.’

‘Roger that.’

‘You’re only twenty.’ Cara says sadly.

Allison closes her eyes. ‘I really don’t think that’s ever mattered.’

‘You could abort.’ Ben says quietly. ‘Give it up for adoption.’

‘The conservative faction would crucify me. I’m the last of my kind, the only one who can give birth to an heir and if I killed it that’s the whole thing done and dusted. Lineage matters.’

‘The father.’

Unbidden she thinks of Derek Hale’s burnt down house. ‘Unlikely to be an issue.’

‘So you keep it.’ Cara places a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll help you.’

Allison holds onto Cara’s hand and gently brings it down to her belly.

\--

The plane is the easy bit. It’s childs play to leave Budapest for London, to leave London for Singapore, to leave Singapore for her final destination. Her hands go to her belly again and again. She imagines the tiny thing inside, growing bigger and bigger every moment. There’s a whole new reality forming in between the skin of her back and her belly. A whole new set of risks.

She closes her eyes on the last streaks of Sydney dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> There will probably be a decent break between this part and the next part due to real life constraints and the fact that the next section is by far the least written of the whole story. It shouldn't be any longer than two weeks and absolutely will be before Christmas.


End file.
